THE  CASUAL  LABORER 
AND  OTHER  ESSAYS 

By 

CARLETON    H.    PARKER 


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THE  CASUAL  LABORER 
AND  OTHER  ESSAYS 


BY 

CARLETON  H.JPARKER 

80METIMB  HEAD   OP  THE  ECONOMICS  DEPARTMENT 

DEAN  OP  THE  SCHOOL  OP  BUSINESS  ADMINISTRATION 

trNXVERSITT  OF  WASHINGTON 


WITH  INTRODUCTION  BY 

CORNELIA  STRATTON  PARKER 

AUTHOR  OF  "an  AMERICAN  EDYLL" 


a 


NEW  YORK 

HARCOURT,  BRACE  AND  HOWE 

1920 


COPYRIGHT,    1920,  BY 
HARCOURT,    BRACE    AND   HOWE,    INC 


TO 
THORSTEIN  VEBLEN 


CONTENTS 

PAGB 

Introduction 3 

I.   Toward  Understanding  Labor  Unrest   .  27 

II.  The  Casual  Laborer 61 

III.  The  I.  W.  W 91 

IV.  Motives  in  Economic  Life 125 

Appendix 

Foreword 169 

Report  on  the  Wheatland  Hop  Fields'  Riot  .  171 


THE  CASUAL  LABORER 


INTRODUCTION 

A  TREMENDOUS  responsibility  rests  upon  anyone 
who  undertakes  to  publish  posthumous  writings. 
Even  though  they  may  have  been  written  to  ap- 
pear in  print  here  and  there,  one  cannot  be  sure 
that  in  later  years  the  author  would  have  wished 
them  given  to  a  wider  public  in  more  permanent 
form.  Yet  the  time  may  come,  as  I  feel  it  has  in 
this  case,  when  the  value  in  publishing  certain 
manuscripts  seems  greater  than  the  drawback 
that  possibly  their  author  would  have  preferred 
to  let  them  rest  in  more  or  less  oblivion. 

The  only  real  reluctance  I  feel  about  publishing 
the  following  papers  concerns  itself  with  the  first 
manuscript,  and  one  which  in  many  respects  is 
perhaps  the  most  vital  paper  of  all.  This  article 
was  not  written  for  publication  in  any  form. 
Back  in  the  winter  of  1916,  Carl  Parker  journeyed 
East  on  what  has  been  termed  his  Research  Mag- 
nificent, to  lay  his  thesis,  mulled  over  until  then 
in  comparative  solitude  in  his  Berkeley  hillside 

3 


4  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

study,  before  the  big  minds  of  the  country  in  his 
field. 

In  New  York,  Boston,  Philadelphia,  Baltimore, 
his  soul  exulted  in  chance  after  chance  for  telling 
discussions  sxid  arguments  concerning  his  loved 
subject,  the  application  of  the  newer  psychology 
to  a  study  of  labor  problems.  Letter  after  letter 
brought  back  to  California  accounts  of  rich  con- 
versations with  the  men  he  had  most  hoped  to 
interest  in  his  thesis,  and  the  resultant  stimulus 
and  encouragement.  Along  toward  Christmas  he 
felt  the  time  had  come  when  he  should  put  his 
thesis  into  writing  and  thereby  receive  even  more 
definite  criticism  from  the  men  whose  ideas  he 
valued.  This  he  did,  and  under  date  of  January 
6th,  1917,  he  wrote:  "...  I  redressed  my  talk 
down  and  raced  to  read  it  to  Professor  Holling- 
worth.  We  spent  four  hours  on  it  and  I  had 
numerous  criticisms  and  hints.  None  adverse  to 
the  thesis,  only  suggestions  as  to  places  where  I 
might  strengthen  it.  .  .  .  I  read  my  paper  to 
Walter  Lippmann  tomorrow  and  then  Monday 
I'll  be  ready  to  type  it  and  get  carbons  to  send 
you.  All  tomorrow  morning  I'll  labor  on  getting 
it  into  better  shape.  0/  course  it  is  written  in 
part  to  call  out  comments,  so  the  statements  are 


INTRODUCTION  5 

strong  and  unmodified.  I  am  sure  that  I'll  see 
just  how  it  will  be  developed  into  a  complete  book 
form  before  I  am  done  with  this  reading  of  it.  I 
feel  it  in  my  bones.  ..."  This  paper  I  have 
titled:  "Toward  Understanding  Labor  Unrest." 
In  a  chronological  arrangement  it  would  have  ap- 
peared second.  It  gives  a  perspective  to  Carl 
Parker's  approach  to  the  study  of  labor  problems ; 
it  is  the  most  intimate  paper  of  all  —  it  was  given 
first  place. 

The  second  paper,  "The  Casual  Laborer,"  ap- 
peared in  1915  in  the  November  Quarterly  Journal 
of  Economics  under  the  title  "The  California 
Casual  and  His  Revolt,"  From  November,  1913, 
to  November,  1914,  Carl  Parker  was  Executive 
Secretary  of  the  California  State  Immigration  and 
Housing  Commission.  In  the  spring  of  1914  he 
was  deputized  to  investigate  the  Wheatland  Hop- 
field  Riot  for  the  Federal  Government.  As  inti- 
mated in  the  first  paper,  perhaps  this  was  as  fruit- 
ful an  incident,  judged  from  the  intellectual  view- 
point, as  he  ever  experienced.  By  its  very  dra- 
matic quality,  it  focused  his  interest,  as  it  fo- 
cused the  interest  of  the  State,  on  the  problem  of 
the  migratory,  the  casual,  the  I.  W.  W.  From 
that  time  on  he  kept  pegging  away  at  the  whys 


6  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

and  wherefores,  and  at  the  very  time  of  his  death 
was  more  intent  than  ever  on  understanding  the 
lower  strata  of  labor,  their  troubles  and  the  pos- 
sible solutions.  Somehow  the  glaring  inadequacy 
of  even  supposedly  intellectual  handling  of  the 
labor  problem  ate  into  his  soul  from  the  time  of 
the  investigation  of  that  Riot  on,  and  he  gave  up 
the  rest  of  his  life  to  digging  as  far  below;  the 
surface  of  labor  unrest  as  he  could  get. 

In  January,  1917,  he  addressed  a  gathering  of 
Wharton  School  people  in  Philadelphia  on  the 
subject  of  the  Western  Labor  Problem,  and  the 
Wheatland  case  in  particular.  I  came  across  the 
following  notes,  the  introduction  to  that  talk: 

"Any  university,  or  in  fact  any  modem,  an- 
alysis of  the  labor  problem  is  composed  of  a  series 
of  formal  briefs  on  temporary  instruments  which 
for  the  moment  find  themselves  used  in  industrial 
society,  such  as  conciliation  and  arbitration,  ap- 
prenticeship, trade  union  structure,  child  labor 
legislation.  University  labor  treatment  is  a  pho- 
tographic sub-science.  It  is  like  a  New  Hamp- 
shire village  church  service  to  a  decayed  gentle- 
woman: it  is  sane  and  gently  daring.  It  has  the 
pleasant  reactions  of  slumming  in  a  picturesque 
but  not  underfed  immigrant  quarter.  Labor,  to 
the  undergraduate,  is  an  interesting  subject. 


INTRODUCTION  7 

"The  real  labor  problem  is  not  this.  It  is  one 
of  individual  psychology.  What  are  men  when 
they  die  as  laborers  or  business  men?  What  kind 
of  grandchildren  follow  them?  What  is  their  so- 
cial heredity?  What  is  the  psychic  balance  sheet? 
It  is  a  relation  between  a  plastic,  sensitive,  easily 
degenerated  nervous  organism  called  "man"  and 
an  environment.  The  product  is  human  character. 
The  labor  problem  is  one  of  character-formation. 
.  .  .  The  importance  of  the  western  labor 
problem  is  that  a  human,  irrational,  de-mechan- 
ized, dynamite-using  labor  type  rose  and  func- 
tioned. ..." 

The  third  paper,  on  "The  I.  W.  W.,"  is  a  re- 
print from  the  Atlantic  Monthly  of  November 
1917,  written  at  the  request  of  the  Editor,  Mr. 
Sedgwick.  No  one  can  claim  that  Carl  Parker 
took  a  detached  academic  view  of  the  I.  W.  W. 
without  any  actual  contact  with  the  class  of  whom 
it  wrote.  From  the  time  of  the  Wheatland  Hop- 
field  Riot  to  his  death,  he  was  only  at  rare  in- 
tervals ever  out  of  touch  with  the  I.  W.  W.  move- 
ment, studying  it  first  hand  at  every  possible 
point.  He  numbered  many  personal  friends  and 
enemies  among  I.  W.  Ws.  To  him  the  problem 
was  never  one  of  three  letters  in  large  type  on  the 


8  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

front  page  of  the  morning  paper.  Human  Beings 
made  up  the  movement  —  not  all  of  them  awaited 
eagerly  by  Saint  Peter  at  the  Starry  Gates,  yet 
just  as  true  not  all  doomed  to  boil  forever  in  the 
caldrons  of  the  damned.  Not  every  Republican 
or  Democrat  is  a  chosen  emissary  of  the  Lord. 

The  reaction  to  this  I.  W.  W.  article  interested 
us  greatly.  One  business  periodical  of  the  North- 
west grew  almost  breathless  in  alarm  —  the  State 
University  was  harboring  a  dangerous  rebel  in  its 
midst  —  he  might  even  be  a  Socialist!  The  only 
safe  thing  was  to  do  away  with  him.  But  on  the 
whole,  readers  were  extremely  interested  in  Carl 
Parker's  viewpoint.  I  have  before  me  some  of  the 
letters  that  came  in  from  friends  and  strangers 
and  the  carbons  of  his  replies.  These  latter  are 
more  informal  than  scholarly  in  their  mode  of  ex- 
pression. One  friend  wrote  from  Canada:  "... 
I  want  to  thank  you  for  the  calmness  with  which 
you  have  discussed  these  people  and  for  the  way 
in  which  you  have  brought  it  home  (at  least  to 
my  way  of  thinking)  to  society  that  the  I.  W.  W. 
is  of  its  own  spawning.  Your  insistence  on  the 
psychological  analysis  is  most  opportune.  ..." 
In  part  the  reply  ran  as  follows:  "...  That 
article  of  mine  which  you  referred  to  would  more 


INTRODUCTION  9 

or  less  tell  you  where  my  modern  interests  lie.  I 
have  had  a  good  deal  better  reports  on  it  than  I 
thought  I  would.  ...  I  feel  that  the  general 
unrest  is  spreading  so  fast  that  this  nippy  little 
civilization  of  ours  will  literally  go  to  pot  unless 
we  do  something  to  iron  out  the  economic  and 
psychological  inequality.  The  riots  in  Germany 
today  are  to  the  point.  If  we  had  a  Napoleon 
scheming  it  we  couldn't  have  a  more  developed 
unrest  than  there  is  in  the  Pacific  Northwest.  The 
working  classes,  both  skilled  and  unskilled,  sus- 
pect the  war  and  the  Government,  the  aims  of 
the  Allies,  the  aims  of  the  Germans,  and  the  aims 
of  the  business  men;  and  the  business  men  and 
the  Allies  and  the  Germans  all  suspect  the  work- 
ing men.  Both  sides  suspect  the  intellectuals  and 
the  intellectuals  are  sore  at  both  sides,  and  no- 
body has  gotten  any  relief  and  so  on  and  so  on. 
The  Department  of  Justice  is  going  to  make  us 
all  patriotic  if  it  has  to  arrest  and  convict  us  in 
order  to  do  so.  So,  generally.  Bill,  somehow  things 
seem  to  be  unrestful." 

One  of  the  country's  big  psychopathologists 
wrote:  "...  I  am  glad  to  see  that  you  are 
in  the  School  of  Business  Administration  for  I 
know  that  the  psychopathological  point  of  view 


10  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

will  be  of  great  use  therein.  I  have  just  read  your 
article  on  the  I.  W.  W.  in  the  current  Atlantic 
and  have  been  recommending  it  to  everybody. 
,  .  .  Hoping  some  day  to  achieve  the  eu- 
phoria of  the  hobo,  I  am  ..."  In  reply  to 
this  letter  Carl  Parker  wrote:  ".  .  .1  think  it 
is  up  to  the  two  of  us  to  actually  do  something 
for  the  euphoria  of  the  hobo  as  well  as  for  several 
other  tough-working  subdivisions  of  his  psycho- 
logical nature.  He  is  certainly  now  wearing  a 
stack  of  crowns  of  thorns  reaching  twenty  to 
thirty  feet  in  the  air  vertically. 

"The  I.  W.  W.  is  the  best  little  object  of  com- 
pensatory activity  for  the  unheroic  to  work  their 
compensating  patriotism  off  on  that  has  existed 
in  modem  times.  .  .  .  This  is  a  great  time  to 
live  in  the  world  and  have  a  little  abnormal  psy- 
chological literature  at  your  elbow.  ...  I  have 
taken  up  my  third  job  for  the  War  Department 
and  am  now  mediating  on  a  threatened  long- 
shoremen strike.  The  longshoremen  have  got  the 
Bolsheviki  looking  like  a  rather  dilapidated 
Christian  Endeavor  Convention.  In  their  last 
little  economic  struggle  out  here  they  killed  off 
some  twenty  participants  and  their  present  plans 
remind  one  of  what  is  alleged  to  be  the  plans  of 


INTRODUCTION  11 

the  Bulgarians  upon  the  prospect  of  their  invasion 
into  Servia.  As  I  said  before  this  is  a  good  time 
to  muss  around  in  economic  affairs." 

A  lawyer  wrote:  "I  have  not  yet  written  and 
told  you  what  I  think  of  your  Atlantic  article.  It 
is  ripping,  and  I  do  not  see  how  you  could  have 

done  better  with  it.  A  bunch  of  us  were  at  0 's 

place  a  few  Sundays  ago  and  went  over  it  to- 
gether. ...   I   have  heard  that  even has 

spoken  approvingly  of  the  article  which  is  a  trib- 
ute to  both  of  you,  for  it  is  not  so  very  long  since 

was  encouraging  the  Fresno  police  to  'drown 

out  the  rats  in  the  jail.'  I  hear  that  conditions 
are  already  improving  in  the  lumber  camps  up 
your  way  and  that  the  eight-hour  day  is  now  be- 
coming the  rule,  also  that  the  camp  conditions  are 
greatly  improved  and  the  lot  of  the  migratory 
worker  in  the  lumber  camps  is  beginning  to  show 
distinct  signs  of  betterment,  and  I  take  great 
pleasure  in  recogniing  that  you  have  had  your 
hand  in  all  of  this.  ..."  In  reply  to  this  letter 
Carl  Parker  wrote:  ".  .  .1  am  just  now  more 
excited  over  the  Bolsheviki  and  its  children,  the 
German  strikes,  than  anything  else  that  has  hap- 
pened. I  could  not  see  how  men  who  had  cast 
loose  their  intellectual  moorings  from  all  the  old 


12  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

inequality  conditions  would  ever  contemplate 
going  back  home  and  putting  themselves  meekly 
into  the  industrial  mess.  I  have  an  idea  that  the 
psychic  basis  of  these  revolts  is  a  fear  of  a  resump- 
tion of  the  old  life.  It  seems  fair  to  prophesy  that 
the  old  order  is  done  though  of  course  it  must  in- 
fluence the  character  of  the  new  order.  Even  if 
there  should  be  an  apparent  resumption  of  the  old 
affairs  in  form,  this  would  not  last  long.  Over 
here  at  American  Lake  you  can  hear  all  kinds  of 
the  most  radical  of  talk  and  I  feel  that  some  kind 
of  a  new  deal  is  on  the  boards  for  the  post-war 
period. 

"Here  in  Seattle  I  am  running  up  against  a 
pretty  reactionary  group  of  employers,  but  even 
among  them  I  find  people  who  have  read  that 
small  Atlantic  Monthly  article  and  are  anxious  to 
talk  about  it.  I  have  gotten  some  fifty  letters 
from  all  kinds  and  conditions  of  people  about 
it.  .   .    . 

"I  am  working  hard  on  trying  to  get  the  lum- 
bermen to  willingly  clean  up  their  camps  and  hold 
some  kind  of  a  sincere  hand  out  to  the  workers, 
and  I  think  I  see  perhaps  where  it  is  beginning  to 
bear  fruit.  I  put  over  what  was  apparently  a 
slightly  premature  acceptance  of  the  eight-hour 


INTRODUCTION  13 

day  in  the  entire  lumber  industry  of  the  Spokane 
district.  The  operators  now  show  a  slight  ten- 
dency to  back  slide.  I  am  working  for  three 
federal  commissions  now  on  different  labor 
troubles  and  I  am  learning  a  heap  and  getting 
batted  over  the  head  with  monotonous  fre- 
quency. ..." 

And  lastly  I  quote  from  the  letter  of  a  strange 
Professor:  "...  I  think  you  have  put  one 
over  in  your  article  on  the  I.  W.  W.  in  the  current 
Atlantic.  More  of  the  same  sort  of  thing  in  similar 
places  will  help  the  cause  of  liberalism  and  de- 
mocracy enormously.  ..."  And  here  Carl 
Parker  wrote:  "...  I  feel  that  the  'cure'  of 
the  I.  W.  W.  lies  in  the  well-known  modern 
method  of  educational  practice  and  theory  and 
that  the  achievement  of  such  a  social  renovation 
is  much  easier  than  our  hysterical  fellow  patriots 
believe.  It  comes  down  to  that  sad  old  compari- 
son between  the  use  of  suppression  in  contrast 
with  a  system  of  wise  social  prevention.  At  times 
I  feel  that  those  who  pretend  to  be  working  patri- 
otically for  unity  are,  in  fact,  the  active  agents  of 
serious  disunity  in  our  nation.  Many  seem  to 
forget  that  being  a  melting  pot  carries  with  it 
certain  serious  attributes.  ..." 


14  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

I  find  some  loose  pages  of  manuscript  among 
Carl  Parker's  papers  which  give  in  a  short  space 
his  approach  to  the  I.  W.  W.  and  certain  forms  of 
labor  unrest:  ".  .  .  The  labor  turnover  sta- 
tistics in  America  are  startling.  The  growing  em- 
ployee inefiiciency  is  a  subconsciously  planned 
neglecting  of  the  work.  Union  recognition,  the 
closed  shop,  the  sympathetic  strike,  are  not  pur- 
sued by  the  unionist  because  of  any  deep  realiza- 
tion of  the  ethical  or  strategic  significance  of  the 
issue,  but  because  it  is  a  means  of  expressing  re- 
sentment at  the  stresses  and  strains  of  their  po- 
sition. This  diverted  energy  becomes  a  relief 
activity,  an  activity  tending,  curiously,  to  re- 
establish the  unionist's  dignity  in  his  own  eyes. 
It  is  impossible  for  man  to  suffer  economic  and 
social  humiliation  without  an  important  feeling 
of  inferiority,  of  minderwiirtigkeit.  A  common 
cure  for  this,  it  has  been  observed,  is  a  resort  to 
some  enterprise  in  pugnacity.  In  modern  trans- 
lation this  means  a  strike  of  more  or  less  violence, 
a  riot,  or  at  least  some  conflict  with  the  law.  Re- 
lief has  been  found  by  dissociation  from  social 
rule  and  giving  some  liberty  and  dominance  to 
the  more  primitive  desires  of  the  sub-conscious. 
A  rabid  Socialist,  an  I.  W.  W.  (even  today  a  paci- 


INTRODUCTION  15 

fist),  has  dissociated  himself  more  or  less  com- 
pletely from  the  going  norms  of  society.  His  sub- 
conscious is  completely  in  the  saddle.  His  fixed 
idea  is  a  mental  complex  supported  by  a  strong 
emotion  and  runs  back  for  its  explaining  cause  to 
a  life  of  extreme  stress  or  privation  or  a  neuras- 
thenic disposition.  The  I.  W.  W.  are  recruited 
from  the  most  degraded  and  unnaturally  living 
of  America's  labor  groups.  Their  inherited  in- 
stincts are  in  toto  either  offered  no  opportunity 
for  functioning,  or  are  harshly  repressed.  They 
are  without  home  security,  have  no  sex  life  ex- 
cept the  abnormal,  they  are  hunted  and  scorned 
by  society;  normal  leadership,  emulation,  con- 
structiveness,  is  unknovm  to  them.  And  it  is  both 
psychically  and  physiologically  a  sound  deduction 
that  they  will  at  all  social  costs  seek  some  relief 
activity.  The  one  prerequisite  for  a  permanent 
acquisition  of  crop-  and  barnburning  as  a  habit 
for  this  migratory  group  is  that  the  law  and  so- 
ciety should  show  itself  properly  and  openly 
fearful.  This,  as  events  in  California,  Arizona, 
and  the  Middle  West  show,  is  the  very  contribu- 
tion of  society.  Deportation,  bull-pens,  imprison- 
ment, is  food  for  the  sore  dignity  of  the 
syndicalist.    It  is  the  psychological  parallel  to  the 


16  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

newspaper  publicity  of  the  ego  crazed  mur- 
derer. ..." 

Also  I  came  across  the  following  short  and  to- 
the-point  statement  of  what  Carl  Parker  con- 
sidered the  L  W.  W.  problem:  "The  I.  W.  W.  is 
a  symptom  of  a  distressing  industrial  status.  For 
the  moment  the  relation  of  its  activities  to  our 
war  preparation  has  befogged  its  economic  origins, 
but  all  purposeful  thinking  about  even  the  I.  W. 
W.'s  attitude  towards  the  war  must  begin  with  a 
full  and  careful  consideration  of  these  origins. 

"All  the  famous  revolutionary  movements  of 
history  gained  their  cause-for-being  from  intimate 
and  unendurable  oppression,  and  their  behavior- 
in-revolt  reflected  the  degree  of  their  suffering. 
The  chartist  and  early  trade  union  riots  in  Eng- 
land, the  revolution  of  1789  in  France,  the  Ni- 
hilists' killings  in  Russia,  the  bitter  attacks  on  the 
railroads  by  the  Grangers  of  the  Northwest,  the 
extremes  into  which  the  Anti-Saloon  League 
propaganda  has  evolved,  are  a  small  part  of  the 
long  revolt-catalogue  of  which  the  I.  W.  W.  is 
the  last  entry.  Each  one  of  these  movements  had 
its  natural  psycho-political  antecedents  and  much 
of  the  new  history  is  devoted  to  a  careful  describ- 
ing and  revaluation  of  them.    At  some  later  and 


INTRODUCTION  17 

less  hysterical  date  the  I.  W.  W.  phenomenon  will 
be  dispassionately  dissected  in  somewhat  the  fol- 
lowing way : 

(1)  There  were  in  1910  in  the  United  States 
some  10,400,000  unskilled  male  workers.  Of  these, 
some  3,500,000  moved,  by  discharge  or  quitting, 
so  regularly  from  one  work  town  to  another  that 
they  could  be  called  migratory  labor.  Because  of 
this  unstable  migratory  existence  the  labor  class 
lost  the  conventional  relationship  to  women  and 
child  life,  lost  its  voting  franchise,  lost  its  habit 
of  common  comfort  or  dignity,  and  gradually  be- 
came consciously  a  social  class  with  fewer  legal  or 
social  rights  than  is  conventionally  ascribed  to 
Americans.  The  cost  of  this  experience  was  ag- 
gravated by  the  ability  and  habituation  of  this 
migratory  class  to  read  about  and  appreciate  the 
higher  social  and  economic  life  enjoyed  by  the 
American  middle  class. 

(2)  The  unskilled  labor  class  itself  experienced 
a  life  not  markedly  more  satisfying  than  the  mi- 
gratories.  One-fourth  of  the  adult  fathers  of 
families  earned  less  than  $400  a  year,  one-half 
earned  less  than  $600.  The  minimum  cost  of 
decent  living  for  a  family  was  approximately  $800. 
Unemployment,  destitution,  and  uncared-for  sick- 
ness was  a  monotonous  familiarity  to  them. 


^x 


18  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

(3)  The  to-be-expected  revolt  against  this  so- 
cial condition  was  conditioned  and  colored  by  the 
disillusionment  touching  justice  and  industrial 
democracy  and  the  personal  and  intimate  indig- 
nities and  sufferings  experienced  by  the  migra- 
tories.  The  revolt-organization  of  the  migratories, 
called  the  I.  W.  W.,  failing,  most  naturally,  to 
live  up  to  the  elevated  legal  and  contract-respect- 
ing standards  of  the  more  comfortable  trade  union 
world,  was  visited  by  severe  middle  class  censure 
and  legal  persecution. 

"This  sketch  is  fairly  complete  and  within  cur- 
rent facts.  No  one  doubts  the  full  propriety  of 
the  government  in  suppressing  ruthlessly  any  in- 
terference by  the  I.  W.  W.  with  the  war  prepara- 
tion. All  patriots  should  just  as  vehemently  pro- 
test against  the  suppression  of  the  normal  eco- 
nomic protest-activities  of  the  I.  W.  W.  There 
will  be  neither  permanent  peace  nor  prosperity  in 
our  country  till  the  revolt-bases  of  the  I.  W.  W. 
are  removed,  and  till  that  is  done  the  I.  W.  W. 
remains  an  unfortunately  valuable  symptom  of  a 
diseased  industrialism." 

The  fourth  paper,  "Motives  in  Economic  Life," 
represents  the  last  piece  of  writing  Carl  Parker 
completed.    This  was  read  before  the  American 


INTRODUCTION  19 

Economic  Association  in  January,  1918,  three 
months  before  his  death.  He  was,  of  course,  tre- 
mendously excited  at  the  opportunity  to  get  his 
new  doctrines  before  a  body  of  economists.  After 
the  paper  he  sent  a  joyous  telegram  back  to  Cali- 
fornia that  it  had  gone  vastly  better  than  he  had 
dared  hope  for.  How  eager  he  was  to  get  his 
ideas  in  book  form !  He  was  working  on  this  book 
until  mediation  duties  in  the  Northwest  took  his 
entire  time. 

There  was  in  the  heart  of  Carl  Parker,  as  there 
must  be  in  the  heart  of  many  true  scholars,  more 
than  the  desire  merely  to  add  to  the  sum  total  of 
earthly  wisdom.  He  possessed  that  quite  under- 
standable and  altogether  worthy  belief  that  be- 
sides adding  to  the  world's  knowledge,  he  had 
something  intellectual  to  give  which  would  actu- 
ally increase  the  larger  happiness  of  men  —  could 
his  theories  be  sensed  by  enough  people  to  assure 
their  application.  Certain  injustices  loomed  large 
to  him  —  the  maladjustment  of  present  income 
distribution  in  a  pecuniary  order  where  money 
was  of  necessity  to  gratify  most  of  normal  instinct 
cravings;  the  unequal  workings  of  the  law  (he 
never  forgot  at  the  time  of  his  Federal  investi- 
gation of  the  Wheatland  Riot  finding  a  friendless 


20  THE   CASUAL   LABORER' 

nineteen-year-old  lad  in  a  country  jail  who  had 
been  there  eight  months  without  any  charge 
whatever  against  him,  —  his  name  not  even  down 
on  any  record.  He  had  been  hurled  into  jail  in 
one  of  those  God-fearing  clean-ups  when  we  rid 
society  of  all  vestiges  of  the  to  us  unpleasant  and 
feel  thereafter  we  can  look  our  Maker  compla- 
cently face  to  face.  "Well  done  thou  good  and 
faithful  servant!"  How  long  the  boy  would  have 
remained  in  his  contaminous  surroundings  had 
Carl  Parker  not  run  across  him  no  one  knows.) 
And  too  he  felt  the  yearning  of  the  worker  himself 
to  understand  the  forces  around  and  against  him. 
He  always  kept  a  letter  from  a  member  of  the 
Cooks  and  Waiters  Union  Local  295,  written  from 
Douglas,  Arizona,  in  1915: 

Mr.  Parker  Prof  of  Economics  State  Univosity  of 

Cal. 
Dear  Sir 

You  were  in  Phoenix  last  fall  on  industrial  relations 
Between  Capital  &  Labor  I  had  the  opertunity  of 
hearing  you  once  in  Trades  Councle  Hall  as  I  did 
not  get  to  hear  your  full  report  on  plan  to  settle 
Labour  Disputes  and  on  Industrial  commissions  I 
would  like  to  know  wether  it  is  Posible  for  you  to 
send  me  one  of  those  charts  or  Practical  Plans  by 
whitch  Labour  Troubles  can  be  avoided  as  I  am 
only  1  among  many  Millions  of  peopple  that  has  to 


INTRODUCTION  21 

pay  the  Price  of  my  rong  Conceptions  and  under- 
standing of  life 
I  remain  yours  as  student  for  Information 

E.  E.  B. 

Yet  the  debt  he  felt  he  owed  was  to  no  one  class 
—  he  labored  to  lift  the  veil  of  uncertainty  and 
doubt  from  his  own  eyes,  and  then  share  his  find- 
ings with  seekers  after  light  be  they  rich  or  poor, 
young  or  old,  employer  or  employed.  While  in- 
tellectually he  might  have  to  recognize  classes  in 
our  social  structure,  in  his  heart  he  knew  none  — 
no  distinctions.  Except  indeed  between  those 
who  were  content  to  let  creation  drift  —  "God's 
in  his  Heaven,  all's  well  with  the  world"  —  who 
held  to  a  complacent  aimless  feeling  of  optimism, 
who  believed  everyone  got  ahead  in  this  country 
who  deserved  to  get  ahead,  —  and  those  who  felt 
that  now  was  the  time  to  strain  every  intellectual 
nerve  in  an  honest,  unembittered  desire  to  under- 
stand the  world,  and  each  according  to  his  abilities 
to  help  in  the  struggle  for  more  sanity,  more 
justice,  more  good-will.  He  blamed  no  one.  He 
tried  to  comprehend  the  forces  at  work  which 
made  for  certain  conditions.  He  tried  to  under- 
stand the  motives  which  led  to  certain  types  of 
conduct.    And,  as  expressed  in  his  report  to  the 


22  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

Governor  on  the  Wheatland  Riot,  he  pleaded  that 
man  should  not  be  judged  apart  from  his  back- 
ground, his  environment.  "Environriient  has  its 
children  as  well  as  men." 

Thus  has  one  of  his  colleagues  described  Carl 
Parker's  intellectual  stand.  ^  "There  have  very 
recently  emerged  in  America  a  few  men  who 
might  most  appropriately  be  called  the  new  fron- 
tiersmen. These  men  have  the  same  simplicity, 
the  same  wander-spirit,  and  the  same  ruggedness 
that  we  so  justly  admire  in  the  best  of  our  older 
adventurers.  But  since  the  geographical  frontier- 
line  of  America  has  become  at  least  temporarily 
fixed  on  Pacific  coasts,  the  new  frontiersmen  have 
sought  the  Hesperides  in  a  new  class-conscious- 
ness, or  rather  inter-class-consciousness.  They 
have  migrated  not  necessarily  from  their  native 
states  but  away  from  many  of  the  superstitions 
which  bound  them.  The  elusive  and  ever-moving 
frontier-line  is  now  economic  rather  than  geo- 
graphical. But  'economic'  is  perhaps  a  vague  and 
dangerous  adjective  because  of  its  narrower  con- 
notations. These  men  have  not  migrated  from 
one  economic  class  into  another.  They  have 
merely  emancipated  themselves  from  the  idols 

1  Herbert  E.  Cory  in  University  of  California  Chronicle,  1918. 


INTRODUCTION  23 

and  taboos  of  the  class  in  which  they  were  born 
and  reared,  though  with  no  intention  of  spurning 
anything  that  is  really  noble  in  these  old  associ- 
ations. On  vital  questions  the  new  frontiersmen 
take  no  pallidly  non-partisan  view.  But  they 
choose  their  sides.  Carleton  H.  Parker  was  one 
of  these  new  frontiersmen.  He  defied  his  foes  and 
he  defied  his  friends.  He  aroused  their  anger  and 
he  aroused  their  love.  He  was  not  too  proud  to 
confess  his  ignorance  in  a  day  when  so  many  men 
and  women  deepen  the  perils  of  civilization  by 
assuming  that  oracular  attitude  which  stills  mo- 
mentarily even  their  own  murmuring  fears.  He 
read  consumedly  but  with  increasing  profit  the 
books  of  the  bolder  men  who  today  seek  light,  as 
Descartes  sought  light  three  hundred  years  ago 
as  a  pioneer  of  a  great  reconstructive  movement, 
by  accomplishing  first  of  all  a  complete  spiritual 
house  cleaning.  Professor  Parker  moved  with 
tireless  energy  among  the  huts  of  lumberjacks,  in 
the  depths  of  mines,  in  city  labor  councils,  in  the 
withering  heat  of  the  hopfields  at  harvest  time, 
in  the  most  intense  class  battles  in  California,  in 
Arizona,  in  Washington.  He  won  the  paternal 
interest  of  a  number  of  brave  American  scientists 
who  from  different  parts  of  the  country  have 


24  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

sounded  their  warnings  during  the  last  ten  years 
to  a  population  profoundly  cursed  with  the  'op- 
timistic squint.'  In  a  word  he  recognized,  what 
all  thoughtful  men  today  must  recognize,  that  the 
chief  hope  for  the  salvation  of  western  civiliza- 
tion lies  in  some  sort  of  aUiance  between  the  labor 
movement  and  the  newly  oriented  sciences  which 
deal  with  the  behavior  of  men,  their  modes  of  or- 
ganization, their  inherited  unit-characters,  and 
their  institutional  habits.  For  this  alliance,  in 
the  interests  of  his  country  in  its  great  crisis, 
Carleton  Parker  worked  and  worked  until,  worn 
out  by  incessant  exertion  in  a  storm  center  of 
labor  difficulties,  he  died  untimely,  consecrating 
a  precious  life  to  American  solidarity. 

"The  open-minded  economist  is  forced  today  to 
take  the  best  account  he  can  of  the  biological 
sciences  (particularly  of  heredity  and  of  animal 
behavior),  of  ethnology,  of  psychology,  of  phil- 
osophy (particularly  those  branches  of  philosophy 
which  today  dub  themselves  'the  problem  of  con- 
sciousness,' 'the  logic  of  science,'  and  'the  study 
of  values').  This  great  duty  Carleton  Parker 
recognized  and  set  himself  with  courage  and  en- 
thusiasm to  fulfill.  .   .   .    We  must  be  content 


INTRODUCTION  ^ 

here  to  emphasize  the  unique  character  of  Pro- 
fessor Parker's  contributions.  He  made  substan- 
tial progress  in  standardizing  the  various  conflict- 
ing inventories  of  human  instincts  (not  unmindful 
of  the  dangers  of  lapsing  back  into  a  'faculties 
psychology')  and  he  sketched  briefly  but  very 
suggestively  the  specifically  economic  significance 
of  these  instincts.  And  above  all,  he  had  thrown 
the  searchlight  of  psychopathology  on  economic 
phenomena  in  a  way  which,  despite  the  disputes 
among  psychopathologists  themselves,  will  as- 
suredly prove  the  beginning  of  a  very  important 
contribution  to  the  social  sciences.  Only  those 
of  us  who  knew  something  of  his  manuscripts  and 
who  sat  under  him  week  after  week  in  his  courses 
can  appreciate  how  rapidly  and  broadly  his 
mastery  was  coming  when  he  gave  his  life  to 
democracy.  .    .    . 

"Carleton  Parker's  most  elaborate  and  trying 
experiences  and  investigations  and  most  of  his 
published  writings  dealt  mainly  with  the  un- 
skilled workmen.  For  years  Professor  Parker  fra- 
ternized with,  remonstrated  with,  studied  and 
wrote  about  our  I.  W.  W.,  concerning  whose  bare 
name  so  many  people  had  hardly  heard  six 
months  ago.     Professor  Parker  belonged   to   a 


26  THE   CASUAL   LABORER^ 

group  of  radicals  which  searches  for  the  roots  of 
things  with  all  the  scientific  acumen  and  tech- 
nique at  its  command.  These  radicals  are  work- 
ing fearlessly  and  tirelessly  for  the  best  interests 
of  the  United  States.  .  .  .  Undoubtedly  Carle- 
ton  Parker's  most  permanent  contribution  to 
science  and  to  his  country  was  his  amazing 
ability  to  turn  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men 
and  women  from  hedonists,  cynics,  sentimen- 
talists, predatory  egoists,  and  dilettantes  into  de- 
voted workers  for  humanity.  .  .  .  For  all  the 
tragedy  of  his  sudden  death  it  may  be  said  quite 
literally  that  his  work  has  only  begun.  He  has 
left  behind  him  a  host  of  men  and  women,  old 
and  young,  employers,  employees,  students,  min- 
isters, lawyers,  scientists,  whose  lives  have  been 
made  vastly  different  by  his  life,  who  are  deter- 
mined to  carry  on  work  like  his  very  much  as 
he  laid  down  the  programme,  who  will  carry  it 
on  with  recurrent  acknowledgements  of  indebted- 
ness to  him,  and  who  love  to  quote  as  he  loved  to 
quote  the  words  of  Woodrow  Wilson: 

"  'We  are  in  a  temper  to  reconstruct  economic 
society  as  we  were  once  in  a  temper  to  recon- 
struct political  society.' " 

Cornelia  Stratton  Parker, 


TOWARD  UNDERSTANDING 
LABOR  UNREST 

A  SHORT  history  will  explain  my  thesis.  In 
1914  I  was  asked  to  investigate  a  riot  among  2800 
migratory  hop  pickers  in  California  which  had 
resulted  in  five  deaths,  many  fold  more  wounded, 
hysteria,  fear  and  a  strange  orgy  of  irresponsible 
persecution  by  the  county  authorities  —  and  on 
the  side  of  the  laborers,  conspiracy,  barn  burn- 
ing, sabotage,  and  open  revolutionary  propaganda. 
I  had  been  teaching  labor  problems  for  three  years 
and  had  studied  it  in  two  American  universities, 
under  Sidney  Webb  in  London,  and  in  four  uni- 
versities of  Germany.  I  found  that  I  had  no  fun- 
damentals which  could  be  called  good  tools  with 
which  to  begin  my  analysis  of  this  riot.  And  I 
felt  myself  merely  a  conventional  if  astonished 
onlooker  before  the  theoretically  abnormal  but 
manifestly  natural  emotional  activity  which  swept 
over  California.  After  what  must  have  been  a 
most  usual  intellectual  cycle  of  first,  helplessness, 

27 


28  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

then  conventional  cataloguing,  some  rational- 
izing, some  moralizing,  and  an  extensive  feeling  of 
shallowness  and  inferiority,  I  called  the  job  done. 

By  accident  at  this  time  I  was  loaned  two  books 
of  Freud,  and  I  felt  after  the  reading  that  I  had 
found  a  scientific  approach  which  might  lead  to 
the  discovery  of  important  fundamentals  for  a 
study  of  unrest  and  violence.  Under  the  stimu- 
tion  I  read  during  a  year  and  a  half  general  psy- 
chology, physiology  and  anthropology,  eugenics, 
all  the  special  material  I  could  find  on  Mendelism, 
works  on  mental  hygiene,  feeblemindedness,  in- 
sanity, evolution  of  morals  and  character,  and 
finally  found  a  resting  place  in  a  field  which  seems 
to  be  best  designated  as  Abnormal  and  Be- 
haviouristic  Psychology.  My  quest  throughout 
this  experience  seemed  to  be  pretty  steadily  a 
search  for  those  irreducible  fundamentals  which 
I  could  use  in  getting  a  technically  decent  opinion 
of  that  riot.  In  grand  phrases  I  was  searching  for 
the  Scientific  Standard  of  Values  to  be  used  in 
analyzing  Human  Behavior.  In  order  to  clarify 
my  peculiar  intellectual  position  I  will  make  this 
additional  statement  regarding  my  trade. 

Nearly  all  modern  economics  is  a  descriptive 
sub-science.    It  is  concerned  in  the  main  with 


UNDERSTANDING   LABOR  UNREST      29 

estimating  the  efficiencies  of  various  instruments 
to  produce  goods,  or  services,  or  law  and  order, 
etc.,  without  any  important  reference  to  the  in- 
fluence of  any  of  these  things  upon  the  evolution 
of  the  human  species.  The  training  of  a  bird  dog 
is  full  of  infinitely  more  human  attentions.  This 
has  allowed  economics  (which  officially  holds  the 
analysis  of  labor  problems)  to  devote  itself  al- 
most entirely  to  the  production  of  goods  and  to 
neglect  entirely  the  consumption  of  goods  and 
human  organic  welfare.  The  lip  homage  given 
by  orthodox  economics  to  the  field  of  consump- 
tion seems  to  be  inspired  merely  by  the  feeling 
that  disaster  might  overcome  production  if 
workers  were  starved  or  business  men  discour- 
aged. So  while  the  official  economic  science 
tinkers  at  its  transient  institutions  which  flourish 
in  one  decade  and  pass  out  in  the  next,  abnormal 
and  behavioristic  psychology,  physiology,  psy- 
chiatry, are  building  in  their  laboratories  by  in- 
duction from  human  specimens  of  modern  eco- 
nomic life,  a  standard  of  human  values  and  an 
elucidation  of  behavior  fundamentals  which  we 
must  use  in  our  legislative  or  personal  modifica- 
tion of  modern  civilization.  It  does  not  seem  an 
over  statement  to  say  that  orthodox  economics 


30  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

has  cleanly  overlooked  one  of  the  most  important 
generalizations  about  human  life  which  can  be 
phrased,  and  that  is, 

That  human  life  is  dynamic,  that  change,  move- 
ment, evolution,  are  its  basic  characteristics. 

That  self  expression,  and  therefore  freedom  of 
choice  and  movement,  are  prerequisites  to  a  satisfying 
human  state. 

Modern  economics  tends  to  think  in  and  talk  of 
static  states,  the  market  price,  an  exchange  value, 
constitutionality,  reasonable  freight  rates,  a  just 
rate  of  interest.  The  old  economic  theory  and  its 
assumptions  were  fatally  faulty  in  their  sim- 
plicity, in  their  obvious  practicality,  in  their  easy 
usableness. 

I  have  just  completed  a  pilgrimage  to  various 
shrines  within  the  human  nature  field,  beginning 
with  Veblen  in  Missouri  and  ending  here  in  New 
England.  The  loot  of  this  trip,  modified  by  my 
personal  intellectual  bias  is  as  follows : 

Man,  to  quote  John  Dewey  specifically  and  to 
condense  the  general  theory  of  Thorndike,  is  a 
mosaic  of  original,  uneradicable,  and  unlearned 
tendencies  to  action,  an  equipment  of  behavior 
unit  characters.  It  matters  little  whether  these 
begin  psychically  isolated  from  each  other  and 


UNDERSTANDING   LABOR   UNREST      31 

numerous,  or  whether  they  begin  with  Brill's  two 
basic  instincts  of  hunger  and  sex,  or  Trotter's 
four  instincts  of  self-preservation,  nutrition,  sex, 
and  gregariousness,  and  then  gain  number  by  the 
numerous  possible  arithmetic  combinations.  As 
good  a  Freudian  as  Adolf  Meyer,  with  a  health- 
bringing  constant  contact  with  human  laboratory 
stuff,  said  that  he  could  not  account  for  much  in 
human  behavior  without  postulating  a  man  born 
with  numerous  fixed  and  unlearned  tendencies  to 
action.  John  B.  Watson  is  ready  to  announce  the 
successful  isolation  and  description  of  five  in- 
stincts through  his  remarkable  experiments  with 
new  born  babies.  I  personally  looked  on  with 
astonishment,  mixed  with  conventional  moral  in- 
dignation, while  he  forced  an  hour-old  and  wailing 
American  infant  to  swing  seven  minutes  by  its 
one-handed  grip  on  a  pencil.  A  negro  baby  with 
a  more  recent  and  virile  biological  memory  swung 
fourteen  minutes. 

Human  action,  shortly  after  birth,  tends  to  find 
itself  exercising  along  certain  stereoptyped  be- 
havior channels,  and  so,  to  avoid  that  border  land 
of  pseudo-metaphysical  speculation  touching  the 
parentage  of  these  tendencies,  I  have  selected  for 
strict  phrasing  instead  of  "instincts,"  the  words 


32  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

"unlearned  tendencies  to  action"  as  describing  the 
original  physical  baggage,  the  so-called  instincts, 
which  accompanies  the  remarkable  anatomical 
contraption  we  have  called  man.  However,  I 
shall  use  "instincts"  and  "unlearned  tendencies" 
as  equivalent  expressions. 

My  only  attempt  at  any  deductive  theorizing 
regarding  instincts  is  this:  Given,  that  order  and 
preparedness  which  variation  and  selection  has 
guaranteed  to  that  life  on  this  earth  which  sur- 
vives, it  seems  that  as  complex,  intricate,  and  de- 
fenseless a  machine  as  man's  body  would  not  be 
found  tm-ned  loose  in  its  highly  dangerous  en- 
vironment without  a  guiding,  a  warning,  a  be- 
havior system.  It  seems  technically  impossible 
to  have  expected  a  survival  of  the  human  species 
if,  taking  biological  competition  as  it  is,  man  had 
been  forced  to  learn  through  trial  and  his  errors  a 
complete  scheme  of  conduct.  Therefore,  it  seems 
fair  to  deduce  for  man  an  unlearned  bundle  of 
instincts  or  tendencies  having  for  the  organism 
high  survival  value.  Without  these  tendencies 
the  human  organism  would  have  had  a  brief  tragic 
struggle  with  its  parasitic  or  flesh  eating  rivals, 
and  man's  participation  in  mundane  affairs  would 
have  been  the  furnishing  of  important  fossil  re- 


UNDERSTANDING   LABOR   UNREST      33 

mains  to  some  future  sober  congress  of  the  sur- 
viving earth  species.  Certainly,  if  we  should 
compare  the  high  degree  of  weakness  of  physical 
competition  which  man  has  developed  in  contrast 
with  his  vertebrate  and  germ  enemies,  and  also 
in  contrast  with  his  own  remote  ape  ancestors, 
one  could  in  retrospect  see  that  the  survival  of  the 
human  species  must  have  had  as  a  prerequisite  a 
rich  and  varied  instinct  equipment  which  removed 
man  from  the  necessity  of  learning  a  complete 
scheme  of  behavior  via  the  dangerous  trial  and 
error  method.  The  species  without  some  un- 
learned and  protective  capacities  would  not  have 
lasted  the  instruction. 

The  importance  to  me  of  the  following  descrip- 
tion of  the  innate  tendencies  or  instincts  lies  in 
their  relation  to  my  main  explanation  of  economic 
behavior  which  is : 

First,  that  these  tendencies  are  persistent,  are  far 
less  warped  or  modified  by  the  environment  than  we 
believe,  that  they  function  quite  as  they  have  for  sev- 
eral hundred  thousand  years,  that  they  as  motives  in 
their  various  normal  or  perverted  habit  form  can 
at  times  dominate  singly  the  entire  behavior  and  act 
as  if  they  were  a  clear  character  dominant. 

Secondly,  that  if  the  environment  through  any  of  the 
conventional  instruments  of  repression  such  as  reli- 


34  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

gious  orthodoxy,  university  mental  discipline,  economic 
inferiority,  imprisonment,  physical  disfigm^ement, 
such  as  short  stature,  hare  lip,  etc.,  repress  the  full 
psychological  expression  in  the  field  of  these  tenden- 
cies, then  a  psychic  revolt,  a  slipping  into  abnormal 
mental  functioning,  takes  place,  and  society  accuses 
the  revolutionist  of  being  either  wilfully  inefficient, 
alcoholic,  a  syndicalist,  supersensitive,  an  agnostic,  or 
insane. 

I  am  willing  to  admit  I  am  about  to  hang  a 
psychological  wreath  about  the  neck  of  the  roll- 
ing stone,  the  law  breaker,  the  mentally  unbal- 
anced. As  Trotter  has  said,  if  we  should  revamp 
our  conventional  idea  of  normality  by  a  study  of 
human  evolution,  there  might  be  a  sensational 
change  in  the  general  social  character  of  the  popu- 
lation of  our  institutions  of  detention.  An  in- 
mate of  an  asylum  in  answer  to  the  bromidic 
question,  "Why  are  you  here,  you  look  all  right?" 
said :  "Lady,  I'm  in  the  minority,  that's  all."  The 
miaority  membership  runs  true  from  St.  Francis 
of  Assissi  to  the  MacNamaras.  Perhaps  one 
should  stop  to  most  seriously  emphasize  this  con- 
cept of  a  new  human  normality  and  also  to  appre- 
ciate the  handicap  to  discussion  which  comes 
whenever  every  analyzer  at  a  round  table  has  a 
very  different  brand  of  human  normality  in  mind. 


UNDERSTANDING   LABOR  UNREST      35 

There  is  that  theoretical  one  hundred  per  cent 
normality  which  is  gained  for  individuals  by  free 
mobility  plus  full  environmental  equipment  of 
persons  and  instruments  and  which  results  in  a 
harmonious  and  full  expression  of  his  psychic  po- 
tentialities. Since  each  vigorous  experimentation 
under  these  conditions  would  generate  wisdom  in 
direct  proportion  to  the  experiment,  I  think  that 
an  evolutionary  and  also  conventionally  desirable 
progress  could  be  prophesied  as  a  result.  This 
progress  has  no  so-called  idealistic  goal  or  di- 
rection. It  has  merely  a  potentiality  for  more 
wisdom.  Not  being  in  possession  of  that  wisdom, 
we  today  cannot  prophesy  its  probable  scheme  of 
conduct. 

A  second  normality  would  be  produced  by  that 
human  mobility  and  freedom,  and  that  environ- 
ment, which  would  give  far  more  unconventional 
experimentation,  far  more  wisdom,  than  we  now 
have,  but  not  the  amount  which  would  crack  hu- 
man nature  by  hurrying  its  change  of  mores  too 
much,  or  destroy  those  institutions  of  civilization 
which  could  be  modified  with  some  hope  of  their 
higher  usefulness.  Conscious  that  man  will 
change,  if  he  is  to  change,  to  this  compromise 
normality  concept,  it  is  such  a  normality  that  I 


36  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

have  in  mind  when  I  use  the  term.  It  is  in  the 
end  in  the  interests  of  such  a  new  Darwinian  nor- 
mality that  the  following  list  of  the  innate  and  un- 
suppressable  tendencies  is  presented.  The  list  is 
a  tentative  and  naturally  an  incomplete  enumer- 
ation of  those  tendencies  which  we  can,  I  think, 
safely  use  in  a  trial  diagnosis  of  present  day  af- 
fairs and  irregularities. 

A  tendency  to  be  sexual  and  under  stereotyped 
stimuli  to  follow  a  universally  observed  method  of 
gratifying  that  desire. 

To  be  hungry. 

To  think  (to  go  over  into  multiform  activity). 

To  experience  mother-love,  etc. 

To  be  gregarious. 

To  be  curious  (to  manipulate,  to  dissect,  to  experi- 
ment) . 

To  fear. 

To  collect,  to  hoard,  to  gain  and  hold  property. 

To  migrate,  to  be  mobile. 

To  feel  revulsion  at  confinement  (cause  of  prison 
psychosis) . 

To  dislike  the  unmeasured,  the  unlimited,  to  dis- 
like to  lie  or  die  in  the  open. 

To  fight,  to  be  near  fighting,  to  call  for  the  knock 
out,  to  be  cruel,  to  be  pugnacious. 

To  lead  a  group,  a  gang,  a  class,  to  be  elected  to 
political  office. 

To  follow  a  leader. 


UNDERSTANDING   LABOR  UNREST      37 

To  display,  to  be  ostentatious,  to  be  vain,  to  be  un- 
conventional in  dress. 

To  be  workmanlike,  to  show  a  quality  sense,  to 
show  a  harmony  sense  in  self  expression. 

To  hunt  (the  sex  chase,  persecution  of  the  weaker, 
to  bully). 

To  vocalize. 


Watson  has  shown,  I  am  confident,  that  an 
original  tendency  for  instance,  like  grasping,  can 
claim  priority  in  the  life  story  of  man.  He  has 
experimented  on  children  a  minute  old  and  his 
handling  was,  within  practical  reason,  the  first 
real  nervous  experience  of  the  infant.  He  feels 
that  such  an  act  could  be  called  the  only  first  ex- 
perience of  the  child,  since  the  next  act  would  be 
modified  by  the  nervous  system  matured  and 
changed  by  its  important,  if  single,  experience. 
This  ignores  the  possibility  that  Watson  will  be 
able  to  deduce  a  prenatal  habituation  in  grasping 
due  to  the  fortuitous  position  of  the  infant  in  the 
womb  which  seems  to  favor  the  right  in  contrast 
to  the  left  hand. 

So,  following  the  illuminating  motor  pattern 
theory  of  E.  B.  Holt,  one  can  say  that  far  back  in 
the  life  of  the  child,  such  a  complementary  subtle 
influencing  of  not  only  every  instinct  by  every 


38  THE  CASUAL  LABORER 

other,  but  the  influence  of  all  past  experiences 
upon  the  developing  act  in  progress,  forces  one  to 
contemplate  each  behavior  act  as  the  external 
manifestation  of  an  inner-instinct-experience- 
agglomeration.  The  general  character  of  an  act 
thus  analyzed  seems  to  the  uninitiated  or  mentally- 
inert  hopelessly  accidental  and  complicated.  So, 
to  escape  the  labor  of  puzzling  out  the  haze  of  a 
behavior  man  and  also  to  avoid  the  burden  of  or- 
dering one's  own  life  after  so  demanding  a  plan, 
man  turns  with  relief  to  the  simple  expedient  of 
reducing  the  salvage  in  human  beings  to  a  soul 
and  saving  it  in  due  and  convenient  time  by  the 
energy  generated  through  hysteria.  Billy  Sunday 
should  be  the  idol  of  lazy  and  bewildered  min- 
isters. Hence  a  father  who  has  neglected  his  son 
for  twenty  years  endeavors  to  correct  the  dissolute 
and  diseased  organism  well  beyond  its  plastic 
period  by  a  "man  to  man"  talk  or  by  turning  him 
indignantly  out  of  the  house.  So  a  mother  who 
has  not  informed  her  daughter  of  her  sex  dispo- 
sition turns  frantically  to  the  psychiatrist;  or  an 
ineflficient  university  teacher  to  examinations  in 
order  to  stimulate. 

Man  seems  to  be  psychically  both  a  blend  and 
a  mosaic.    An  abnormal  repression  of  one's  innate 


UNDERSTANDING   LABOR   UNREST      39 

tendency  modifies  to  an  important  extent  the 
method  of  gratification  and  the  insistence  for  the 
gratification  of  every  other  tendency.  Each  act 
and  its  behavior  can  only  be  accurately  described 
as  being  the  visible  indication  of  a  sort  of  com- 
posite sentiment  which  includes  in  its  basis  every 
experience  we  have  ever  lived  through,  and  added 
to  this,  the  bundle  of  innate  tendencies  within  us. 
A  short  discussion  of  some  of  the  conventional 
influencing  of  one  innate  tendency  by  another  will 
illustrate.  The  innate  tendency  to  think  or  medi- 
tate can  be  sex  day  dreaming  or  musing  over  rail- 
way rates.  Its  duration  and  character  is  largely 
dominated  by  the  activity  of  our  own  innate  ten- 
dency to  be  workmanlike.  An  innate  gregarious 
tendency.  Trotter  maintains,  must  be  accepted  in 
order  to  explain  our  universal  subservience  to 
public  opinion  and  convention.  This  innate  sub- 
servience modifies  our  sex  expression,  our  experi- 
mentation, our  pugnacious  satisfactions,  our  van- 
ities, even  our  father  and  mother  love.  Veblen 
has  said  that  a  standard  of  workmanlike  conduct 
influences  profoundly  the  manner  in  which  all 
innate  tendencies  find  their  gratification.  The 
followers  of  Freud  have  written  the  sex  instinct 
preponderantly  into  every  human  act.    This  is, 


40  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

I  think,  a  misuse  of  a  structural  truth.  Every 
act-emotion  has  a  strain  of  sex  running  through  it 
as  it  has  a  strain  of  every  other  innate  tendency. 
The  quarrel  with  Freud's  followers  seems  to  be 
only  one  of  over-emphasis.  I  do  not  think  that 
life  taken  in  the  mass,  or  the  newer  psychological 
experiments,  afford  evidence  for  their  emphasis. 
It  affords,  it  is  true,  evidence  for  an  emphasis 
vastly  beyond  anything  that  convention  will 
allow.  Freud  is  probably  right  also  in  estimating 
that  convention's  opposition  is  heavily  re-en- 
forced by  those  who  for  mixed  reasons  fear  an  ex- 
pose of  their  psychical  state.  Sex  has  so 
manifestly  mixed  itself  up  with  migrations,  war, 
vanity,  leadership,  fear,  curiosity,  etc.,  that  one  is 
forced  to  wage,  in  the  name  of  observed  fact,  an 
incessant  warfare  with  one's  own  religion,  family 
mores,  university  utilitarianism  and  current  liter- 
ature. Nothing  becomes  the  economic  world  so 
ill  as  their  record  under  the  touchstone  of  the  sex 
problem.  The  fact  that  ninety  per  cent  of  the 
migratory  workers  have  no  women  awakens  no 
train  of  thought.  Economists  are  apparently  one 
with  the  Chicago  Vice  Commission,  —  the  Sex  In- 
stinct can  be  abolished. 
Leadership  acts  in  the  interests  of  a  dozen  other 


UNDERSTANDING   LABOR   UNREST      41 

manifest  tendency-satisfactions.  Authority  gives 
to  the  tendency  to  be  curious,  to  investigate,  to 
wonder  about,  and  speculate,  not  only  tremendous 
evolutionary  value  but  great  preeminence  among 
the  tendencies  striving  for  general  dominance.  It 
is  the  proclivity  which  has  made  so-called  progress 
possible  and  its  inhibition,  as  Trotter  argues, 
through  conservatism  and  orderly  moulding  of  life, 
is  the  cause  of  well  grounded  pessimism  about  the 
future  of  the  human  race. 

If  these  be  the  unlearned  tendencies,  how  do 
they  function?  And  perhaps  if  the  problem  be 
not  too  appalling,  what  is  a  full  functioning,  a 
complete  psychological  life?  Since  Freud,  the 
pioneer  in  such  an  analysis,  began  with  a  descrip- 
tion of  manifest  anti-normal  functioning,  the  evi- 
dence is  mainly  in  this  field,  and  one  is  practically 
driven  to  paint  the  picture  of  a  true  normal  life 
by  the  crude  method  of  describing  the  opposite. 
At  any  rate  the  practice  of  first  labor  would  be  to 
free  man  from  balkings  and  inhibitions.  And  then 
for  the  moment,  trust  like  an  idealist  that  the  re- 
leased human  energy  would  muddle  man  to  a  con- 
ventionally nicer  level.  The  innate  tendencies, 
making  up  as  they  do  the  total  motive  power  of 
man,  gain  an  expression  depending  absolutely  on 


42  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

the  liberty  afforded  them  by  the  environment  and 
on  the  quality  of  the  tools  at  hand.  For  sex,  for 
migration,  gregariousness,  collecting,  leadership, 
etc.,  there  seem  methods  of  satisfying  which  not 
only  feel  right  and  just  to  our  experienced  selves, 
but  these  methods  seem  to  have  a  place  in  the 
scheme  of  conduct  of  biologically  vigorous  per- 
sons. 

So  we  ascribe  a  high  degree  of  normality  to 
these  methods  of  satisfying.  In  contrast  to  these 
in  reality  rare  if  desirable  ways,  are  countless  ways 
of  gratification  which  are  compromises  between  a 
fair  approximation  of  this  norm  and  a  gratification 
so  pitiful  or  so  psychically  costly  or  nauseatingly 
revolting  or  so  egotistically  brutal  that  much  of 
orthodox  religion  is  devoted  to  the  simple  task 
of  either  hiding  these  or  damning  them  to  death. 
Denied  a  normal  expression  one  is  said  to  sub- 
limate the  energy,  evaporate  it  off  through  de- 
votion to  a  different  satisfaction.  One  is  also  said 
to  compensate  through  a  kindred  substitute-ac- 
tivity for  the  thwarting  of  the  direct  instinct  ex- 
pression. 

One  of  the  great  discoveries  of  Freud  was  that 
in  early  childhood  all  the  psychical  equipment  is 
present  and  pressing  for  gratification,  and  that  the 


UNDERSTANDING   LABOR   UNREST      43 

highly  repressive  character  of  the  conventional 
discipline  for  children  guaranteed  an  immense 
number  of  minor  and  major  thwartings  and  the 
attendant  complexes.  These  complexes  arise  in 
such  a  manner  as  this :  Little  children  have  a  uni- 
versal and  instinctive  interest  in  manipulating 
anything  they  can  get  their  hands  on,  in  pulling  it 
to  pieces  and  looking  at  its  insides.  Toys  in  the 
hands  of  free  children  are  soon  reduced  to  their 
elements,  the  young  of  their  pet  animals  die  under 
their  experiments.  The  fact  that  our  own  family 
cat  had  presented  the  household  with  an  expected 
bunch  of  kittens  came  to  me  through  the  query  of 
my  four-year-old  son  as  to  why  little  kittens  could 
not  swim.  Experiments  of  his  on  the  brood  of 
blind  kittens  in  a  horse  trough  had  produced  en- 
ligtening  if  fatal  consequences.  The  results  of 
balking  innate  dispositions  of  children  are  il- 
luminated by  the  details  of  a  case  taken  from  the 
records  of  a  New  York  psychiatrist  (Brill).  A 
small  child  born  into  a  wealthy  family  was  neg- 
lected from  infancy  by  her  parents.  Her  only 
relation  with  them  was  a  daily  interview  with  her 
mother  in  which  the  condition  of  her  clothing  was 
inspected  and  a  nurse's  recital  of  her  breaches  of 
discipline  heard.    The  nurse  told  the  mother  one 


44  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

day  of  the  child's  breaking  a  valuable  vase  by 
pulling  it  off  the  table.  The  mother  at  that  mo- 
ment was  nervous  and  annoyed  by  some  other 
event  and  had  burst  out  with  unexpected  fury. 
She  whipped  the  child  before  the  nurse.  It  was 
the  first  time  she  had  ever  touched  the  child.  The 
child  during  the  whipping  had  hysterically  re- 
peated over  and  over  again,  "I  only  wanted  to 
see  what  was  inside  the  vase."  The  nurse  in  order 
to  stand  well  with  the  mother  instituted  a  cal- 
culated system  of  activity  repression  for  the  child, 
and  to  gain  enforcement  of  her  rules,  built  up  by 
threats  and  terrifying  stories  a  horde  of  spirits 
and  devils  who  inhabited  the  dark  forbidden 
rooms  or  bric-a-brac.  The  child,  for  relief  to 
her  innate  demands,  began  to  build  up  phan- 
tasies and  delusions.  Frequently  she  would  stand 
an  hour  or  more  looking  out  a  window  at  a  vacant 
lot.  Later  this  nurse  was  discharged,  and  a  loving 
and  mystical  old  woman  hired  in  her  place.  This 
person  entered  into  the  spirit  world  of  the  child 
with  enthusiasm  and  the  two  developed  this  phan- 
tasizing,  this  habit  fixation,  into  infinite  detail. 
When  later  this  nurse  was  discharged  for  intem- 
perance the  girl,  then  past  adolescence,  developed 
immediately  a  high  irrationality,  was  very  fearful, 


UNDERSTANDING   LABOR   UNREST      45 

and  suffered  extreme  night  terrors.  The  psy- 
chiatrist found  that  the  child  had  identified  the 
nurse  with  her  obsessional  and  perverted  phan- 
tasy habit  and  that  with  her  gone,  life  was  an  ir- 
resistible terror.  The  intemperate  maid  was  re- 
hired and  an  interview  had  with  the  mother  in 
which  the  scientific  results  of  her  mother  infidelity 
were  enumerated.  The  mother  is  now  trying  to 
give  to  her  daughter  something  of  those  experi- 
ences lost  to  her  in  her  childhood  and  to  become  a 
satisfaction-feature  of  the  child's  life  rather  than 
a  dreaded  guilt-reminder,  a  repression-spectre  who 
is  to  be  hated,  avoided  and  fooled.  In  lesser  de- 
gree and  with  milder  results  this  story  is  repeated 
in  the  lives  of  millions  of  children.  If  we  should 
sympathetically  take  the  tentative  list  of  innate 
human  proclivities  here  presented,  and  using 
them  as  norms  investigate  the  infinite  detail  of 
the  lives  of  one  hundred  children  in  the  period 
between  birth  and  their  year  of  adolescence,  we 
should  uncover  literally  thousands  of  serious  com- 
plexes and  fixations.  Mothers,  fathers,  teachers, 
ministers,  playmates,  the  sophisticated  street 
idler,  all  taken  together  Trotter's  social  censor  — 
conventional  society  —  gives  the  repressive  force. 
Fear  of  punishment  by  parent  or  teacher,  fear  of 


46  THE  CASUAL  LABORER 

public  scorn,  fear  of  a  playmate's  ridicule,  fear  of 
being  caught  kissing  one's  mother,  fear  of  the  po- 
liceman, of  being  uninvited,  the  educated  fear  of 
the  darkness  and  its  population  of  devils,  fear  of 
the  unknown  and  the  limitless,  fear  of  a  cheap 
funeral,  fear  of  being  out  of  style,  fear  of  being  off 
the  band  wagon,  fear  of  not  being  right,  all  these 
give  us  our  psychic  hot  points,  our  obsessions. 

An  interesting  generalization  can  be  made  here. 
These  guilt  obsessions  result  almost  universally  in 
an  inferiority  phobia,  a  "minderwertigkeit,"  a  feel- 
ing of  guilt.  This  inferiority-realization  creates 
two  types  of  reaction  —  either  the  person  affected 
is  weak  kneed,  submissive,  yellow  streaked,  a  back- 
slider, a  fair  weather  friend;  or  secondly,  he  be- 
comes a  strange  creature  who  compensates  for  his 
inferiority  by  an  aggressive  ordering  of  his  life  as 
if  he  were  imbued  with  the  opposite  character 
virtues.  Among  notable  inferiority  compensations 
of  this  class  are : 

Bragging  of  the  timid. 
Bravery  of  the  physically  small. 
Cheerfulness  of  the  dying  (Tuberculosis  Psychosis) . 
Washing  mania  of  the  immoral. 
Orthodoxy  of  Rockefeller. 
The  vociferously  "fair"  to  laborers. 
Ostentatious  interest  of  cotton  mill  owners  in  the 
welfare  of  the  child  workers. 


UNDERSTANDING   LABOR   UNREST      47 

The  peace  work  of   Carnegie  in   contrast  to   his 
Homestead  strike  policy. 
Acquisition  of  the  dyspeptic. 
Dilettante  intellectualism  of  the  self-made. 
Patriotism  of  the  unheroic. 
Generosity  of  the  saloon-keeper  to  the  poor. 

By  this  devious  path  I  come  now  to  the  char- 
acter of  evolution  in  the  field  of  modern  indus- 
trialism. Children  of  the  middle  class  without 
doubt  have  a  more  unhealthy  psychic  life  than 
those  of  the  working  class.  But  following  the 
statistics  of  evident  malnutrition,  short  school 
experience,  and  the  abnormally  high  death  rate 
of  children  of  mill  towns,  our  conventional  mores 
have  moved  us  to  general  if  mild  conviction  that 
children  of  the  working  class  are  woefully  badly 
off.  It  seems,  however,  that  the  necessary  laxness 
of  working  home  discipline,  the  decay  among  the 
working  population  of  respect  for  conventional 
rules  and  law,  the  favorable  opportunities  for  the 
children  to  quit  school,  the  plasticity  of  the  codes 
governing  street  social  life,  all  work  in  an  impor- 
tant manner  towards  allowing  a  relatively  free 
and  healthy  psychic  development  of  the  children 
affected  by  it.  Working  mothers  have  not  the 
time  to  enforce  minutely  the  best  current  moral 


48  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

standards,  for  it  takes  much  of  the  day's  energies 
of  the  upper  middle  class  mother  to  create  by- 
such  an  enforcement  that  atmosphere  whose  fre- 
quent and  almost  normal  product  is  the  above 
analyzed  sexual  and  economic  abnormalties. 
I  However,  at  a  later  date  in  the  life  of  these 
working  class  children,  certain  powerful  forces  in 
their  environment,  though  they  work  on  the  less 
susceptible  and  less  plastic  natures  of  mature  in- 
dividuals, produce  obsessions  and  thwartings 
which  function  at  times,  exclusively  almost,  in 
determining  the  behavior  of  great  classes  of  the 
industrial  population.  The  powerful  forces  of  the 
working  class  environment  which  thwart  and  balk 
instinct  expression  are  suggested  in  the  phrases 
monotonous  work,  dirty  work,  simplified  work, 
mechanized  work,  the  servile  place  of  labor,  in- 
secure tenure  of  the  job,  hire  and  fire,  winter  un- 
employment, the  ever  found  union  of  the  poor 
district  with  the  crime  district,  and  the  restricted 
district  with  prostitution,  the  open  shop,  and 
labor  turnover,  poverty,  the  breadlines,  the  scrap 
heap,  destitution.  If  we  postulate  some  twenty 
odd  unit  psychic  characters  which  are  present 
under  the  laborer's  dirty  blouse  and  insistently 
demand  the  same  gratification  that  is  with  painful 


UNDERSTANDING   LABOR  UNREST      49 

care  planned  for  the  college  student,  in  just  what 
kind  of  perverted  compensations  must  a  laborer 
indulge  to  make  endurable  his  existence?  A 
western  hobo  tries  in  a  more  or  less  frenzied  way 
to  compensate  for  a  general  all  embracing  thwart- 
ing of  his  nature  by  a  wonderful  concentration 
of  sublimation  activities  on  the  wander  instinct. 
The  monotony,  indignity,  dirt  and  sexual  apolo- 
gies of,  for  instance,  the  unskilled  worker's  life 
bring  their  definite  fixations,  their  definite  irra- 
tional inferiority  obsessions.  The  balked  laborer 
here  follows  one  of  the  two  described  lines  of 
conduct : 

First,  either  weakens,  becomes  inefficient,  drifts 
away,  loses  interest  in  the  quaUty  of  his  work,  drinks, 
deserts  his  family,  or, 

Secondly,  he  indulges  in  a  true  type-inferiority  com- 
pensation and  in  order  to  di^ify  himself,  to  eliminate 
for  himself  his  inferiority  in  his  own  eyes,  he  strikes 
or  brings  on  a  strike,  he  commits  violence  or  he  stays 
on  the  job  and  injures  machinery,  or  mutilates  the 
materials;  he  is  fit  food  for  dynamite  conspiracies.  He 
is  ready  to  make  sabotage  a  part  of  his  regular  habit 
scheme.  His  condition  is  one  of  mental  stress  and 
unfocussed  psychic  unrest,  and  could  in  all  accuracy 
be  called  a  definite  industrial  psychosis.  He  is  neither 
wilful  nor  responsible,  he  is  suffering  from  a  stereo- 
typed mental  disease. 


50  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

If  one  leaves  the  strata  of  unskilled  labor  and 
investigates  the  higher  economic  classes  he  finds 
parallel  conditions.  There  is  a  profound  unrest 
and  strong  migratory  tendency  among  department 
store  employees.  One  New  York  store  with  less 
than  three  thousand  employees  has  thirteen  thou- 
sand pass  in  a  year  through  its  employ.  Since  the 
establishment  in  American  life  of  "big  business" 
with  its  extensive  efficiency  systems,  its  order  and 
de-humanized  discipline,  its  caste  system,  as  it 
were,  there  has  developed  among  its  highly  paid 
men  a  persistent  unrest,  a  dissatisfaction  and  de- 
cay of  morale  which  is  so  notable  and  costly  that 
it  has  received  repeated  attention.  Even  the  con- 
ventional competitive  efficiency  of  American 
Business  is  in  grave  question.  I  suggest  that  this 
unrest  is  a  true  psychosis,  a  definite  mental  un- 
balance, an  efficiency  psychosis,  as  it  were,  and 
has  its  definite  psychic  antecedents  —  and  that 
our  present  moralizing  and  guess-solutions  are 
both  hopeless  and  ludicrous.  We  blindly  trust 
that  a  ten  per  cent  wage  increase  will  cure  that 
breakdown  which  a  sympathetic  social  psychia- 
trist might,  if  given  all  power,  hope  merely  to  al- 
leviate. Other  economic  classes  suffer  from  the 
limited    outlet    their    environment    affords  —  a 


UNDERSTANDING   LABOR  UNREST      51 

narrow  thwarted  life  drives  unmarried  women  into 
France  as  nurses.  Students,  disappointed  and 
balked  by  the  impersonal  and  perfunctory  instruc- 
tion given  in  American  universities,  compensate 
by  an  enthusiasm  over  athletics  and  student  ac- 
tivities which,  if  part  expended  in  intellectual 
exercise,  would  revolutionize  society.  College 
athletics  is  a  sort  of  psychic  cure  for  the  illness  of 
experiencing  a  university  education.  The  ac- 
tivity of  many  particularly  placid  people  in  the 
interests  of  peace  might  be  identified  as  a  com- 
pensatory and  satisfying  identification  of  their 
fearful  selves  with  a  desirable  state  of  bloodshed. 
Many  unmarried  and  repressed  women  gain  a  vi- 
carious sex  equivalent  in  a  morbid  interest  in 
births,  funerals,  fires,  and  collecting  things  having 
sex  symbolic  value. 

The  most  notable  inferiority  compensation  in 
industrial  life  is  the  strike.  The  strike  has  two 
prerequisites,  —  a  satisfactory  obsessijon  in  the 
labor  mind,  and  a  sufiicient  decay  in  the  eyes  of 
labor  of  the  prestige  of  social  norms,  to  allow  the 
laborer  to  make  those  breaches  of  law  and  conven- 
tion which  a  well  run  strike  of  today  demands. 
The  violence  of  the  strike  varies  directly  with 
both  the  psychic  annoyance  due  to  the  obsession 


52  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

and  with  the  extent  of  decay  in  the  striker's  eyes 
of  conventional  mores.  Veblen  has  shown  how 
modern  machine  technology  gives  a  causal,  de- 
terministic bias  to  labor  class  thinking  and  how 
this  bias  makes  impossible  the  acceptance  at  face 
value  of  the  mystic,  anthropomorphic  pretensions 
of  law  and  business  rights.  These  pretensions 
seem  fitted  to  endure  only  in  a  society  experienc- 
ing a  placid,  unaroused  and  ox-like  existence,  or 
in  one  where  the  prestige  of  law  and  order  is  main- 
tained by  a  large  professional  army  and  a  policy 
of  frightfulness  not  rendered  inefficient  by  the  in- 
opportune presence  of  emotional  religions. 
Neither  of  these  prerequisites  is  present  in 
America,  so  our  strikes  tend  to  reflect  without 
serious  modification  both  the  psychic  ill-health 
generated  by  the  worker's  experience,  and  the 
rapid  and  interesting  decay  of  the  respect  and 
popularity  of  the  law,  the  courts,  property,  and 
the  rich  man.  Trotter  has  described  modern  so- 
cial revolt  as  the  war  between  man  stimulated  by 
his  sore  psychical  experiences  and  the  Power  of 
the  Herd.  This  is  but  a  Veblenesque  description 
of  the  strike. 

My  main  thesis  might  be  stated  as  a  plea  to 
consider  the  states  of  conventional  "Willfulness," 


UNDERSTANDING   LABOR  UNREST      53 

such  as  laziness,  inefficiency,  destructiveness  in 
strikes,  etc.,  as  ordinary  mental  disease  of  a  func- 
tional kind,  a  sort  of  industrial  psychosis.  If  we 
accept  this  approach  then  the  cure  for  these  men- 
acing social  ailments  beckons  to  us  from  the  field 
of  abnormal  and  comparative  psychology.  We 
must,  however,  be  prepared  for  a  thorough  mental 
house  cleaning.  Conventional  thinking,  conven- 
tional economics  and  its  standards  of  value,  are 
ruled  out  because  they  assisted  in  the  promotion 
of  evolutionary  inefficiency.  For  instance,  most 
economists  glory  in  cheap  and  much  food,  cheap 
and  much  timber,  cheap  and  good  land,  though 
it  seems  that  these  easy  and  unearned  gifts  have 
given  the  American  part  of  the  human  race  a 
psychic  bias  towards  uncritical  waste,  an  undis- 
turbed liking  for  rapid  and  spectacular  consump- 
tion, and  a  listlessness  over  questions  of  the  ul- 
timate problems  of  human  survival,  which  make 
our  intellectual  processes  curiously  like  those  of 
primitive  man. 

The  habituation  of  the  higher  constructive  in- 
stinct in  us  has  been  slurred  (except  where  they 
are  narrowly  concerned  with  production  for 
waste)  and  the  more  genuinely  indicative  and 
more  difficultly  attained  workmanlike  qualities  of 


54  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

contemplative  thinking:  art,  poetry,  evolutionary 
speculation,  behavior  study,  philosophy,  etc.,  are 
notoriously  neglected  and  in  possession  of  mani- 
festly inadequate  and  unsatisfactory  norms. 

If  I  might  be  allowed  to  propose  a  program  for 
reform  this  is  such  a  program:  Reform  needs  a 
militant  minority,  or  to  follow  Trotter,  a  small 
Herd.  This  little  Herd  would  give  counsel,  relief, 
and  recuperation  to  its  members.  The  members 
and  the  Herd  will  be  under  merciless  fire  from  the 
convention-ridden  members  of  general  society. 
They  will  be  branded  outlaws,  radicals,  agnostics, 
impossible,  crazy.  They  will  be  lucky  to  be  out 
of  jail  most  of  the  time.  They  will  work  by  trial 
and  study,  gaining  wisdom  by  their  errors  as 
Sidney  Webb  and  the  Fabians  did.  In  the  end, 
after  a  long  time,  parts  of  the  social  sham  will 
collapse,  as  it  did  in  England,  and  small  promises 
will  become  milestones  of  progress. 

From  where,  then,  can  we  gain  recruits  for  this 
minority?  Two  real  sources  seem  in  existence,  the 
universities,  and  the  field  of  mental  disease  spec- 
ulation and  hospital  experiment.  The  one,  the 
universities,  with  rare  if  wonderful  exceptions, 
are  fairly  hopeless,  the  other  is  not  only  rich  in 
promise  but  few  realize  how  full  in  performance. 


UNDERSTANDING   LABOR  UNREST      55 

Most  of  the  literature  which  is  gripping  that  great 
intellectual  no-man's  land  of  the  silent  readers  is 
basing  its  appeal  and  its  story  on  the  rather  un- 
colored-up  and  bald  facts  which  come  from  Freud, 
Trotter,  Robinson,  Dewey,  E.  B.  Holt,  Lippmann, 
Morton  Prince,  Pierce  Bailey,  Hart,  Overstreet, 
Thorndike,  Campbell,  Meyer,  Stanley  Hall,  Adler, 
White  and  Watson.  It  is  from  this  field  of  com- 
parative or  abnormal  psychology  that  the  chal- 
lenge to  industrialism  and  the  program  of  change 
will  come. 

But  suppose  you  ask  me  to  be  concrete  and  give 
an  idea  of  such  a  program.  Take  simply  the  be- 
ginning of  life,  take  childhood,  for  that  is  where 
the  human  material  is  least  protected,  most 
plastic,  and  where  most  injury  today  is  done.  In 
way  of  general  suggestion  I  would  say,  exclude 
children  from  formal  disciplinary  life,  such  as  that 
of  all  industry  and  most  schools,  up  to  the  age  of 
eighteen.  After  excluding  them,  what  shall  we 
do  with  them?  Ask  John  Dewey  or  read  his 
"Schools  of  Tomorrow"  or  "Democracy  and  Edu- 
cation." It  means  tremendous,  unprecedented 
money  expense  to  insure  an  active  trial  and  error 
learning  activity,  a  chance  to  naturally  recapitu- 
late the  racial  trial  and  error  learning  experience, 


56  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

a  study  and  preparation  for  those  periods  of  life  in 
which  fall  the  ripening  of  the  relatively  late  ma- 
turing instincts,  a  general  realizing  that  wisdom 
can  come  only  from  experience  and  not  from  the 
Book.  It  means  psychologically  calculated  child- 
hood opportunity  in  which  the  now  stifled  in- 
stincts of  leardership,  workmanship,  hero  worship, 
•hunting,  migration,  meditation,  sex,  could  grow 
and  take  their  foundation  place  in  the  psychic 
equipment  of  a  biologically  promising  human  be- 
ing. To  illustrate  in  trivialities,  no  father,  with 
knowledge  of  the  meaning  of  the  universal  bent 
towards  workmanship,  would  give  his  son  a  puzzle 
if  he  knew  of  the  Mecano  or  Erector  toys,  and  no 
father  would  give  the  Mecano  if  he  had  grasped 
the  educational  potentiality  of  the  gift  to  his  child 
of  $10  worth  of  lumber  and  a  set  of  good  car- 
penters tools.  There  is  now  enough  loose  wisdom 
around  devoted  to  childhood,  its  needs,  liberties, 
and  experiences,  both  to  give  the  children  of  this 
civilization  their  first  evolutionary  chance,  as  well 
as  to  send  most  teachers  back  to  the  farm. 

In  the  age  period  of  eighteen  to  thirty  would 
fall  that  pseudo-educational  monstrosity,  the  un- 
dergraduate university,  and  the  degrading  popular 
activities  of  "beginning  a  business"  or  "picking  up 


UNDERSTANDING  LABOR  UNREST      57 

a  trade."  Much  money  must  be  spent  here.  Per- 
haps few  fields  of  activity  have  been  conventional- 
ized as  much  as  university  education.  Here,  just 
where  a  superficial  theorist  would  expect  to  find 
enthusiam,  emancipated  minds,  and  hope,  is 
found  fear,  convention,  a  mean  instinct  life,  no 
spirit  of  adventure,  little  curiosity,  in  general  no 
promise  of  preparedness.  No  wonder  philosophical 
idealism  flourishes  and  Darwin  is  forgotten.  The 
first  two  years  of  university  life  should  be  devoted 
to  the  Science  of  Human  Behavior.  Much  of  to- 
day's biology,  zoology,  history,  if  it  is  interpre- 
tative, psychology  if  it  is  behavioristic,  philos- 
ophy, if  it  is  pragmatic,  literature  if  it  had  been 
written  involuntarily,  would  find  its  place  here. 
The  last  two  years  could  profitably  be  spent  in 
appraising  with  that  ultimate  standard  of  value 
gained  in  the  first  two  years,  the  various  insti- 
tutions and  instruments  used  by  civilized  man. 
All  instruction  would  be  objective,  scientific,  and 
emancipated  from  convention  —  wonderful  pros- 
pect! 

In  industrial  labor  and  in  business  employ- 
ments a  new  concept,  a  new  going  philosophy 
must  unreservedly  be  accepted  which  has,  instead 
of  the  ideal  of  forcing  human  beings  to  mould 


58  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

their  habits  to  assist  the  continued  existence  of 
the  inherited  order  of  things,  an  ideal  of  moulding 
all  business  institutions  and  ideas  of  prosperity 
in  the  interests  of  scientific  evolutionary  aims  and 
large  human  pleasures.  As  Pigou  has  said,  "En- 
vironment has  its  children  as  well  as  men."  Mo- 
notony in  labor,  tedium  in  office  work,  time  spent 
in  business  correspondence,  the  boredom  of  run- 
ning a  sugar  refinery,  would  be  asked  to  step  be- 
fore the  bar  of  human  affairs  and  get  a  health 
standardization.  Today  industry  produces  goods 
that  cost  more  than  they  are  worth,  are  consumed 
by  persons  who  are  degraded  by  the  consuming  of 
them,  destroying  permanently  the  raw  material 
source  which  science  has  painfuUy  explained  could 
be  made  inexhaustible.  Some  intellectual  revo- 
lution must  come  which  will  de-emphasize  busi- 
ness and  industry  and  re-emphasize  most  other 
ways  of  self  expression.  In  Florence  around  1300, 
Giotto  painted  a  picture  and  the  day  it  was  to  be 
hung  in  St.  Marks  the  town  closed  down  for  a 
holiday  and  the  people  with  garlands  of  flowers 
and  songs  escorted  the  picture  from  the  artist's 
studio  to  the  church.  Three  weeks  ago  I  stood  in 
company  with  500  silent,  sallow-faced  men  at  a 
corner  on  Wall  Street,  a  cold  and  wet  corner,  till 
young  Morgan  issued  from  J.  P.  Morgan  and  Co, 


UNDERSTANDING  LABOR  UNREST      59 

and  walked  twenty  feet  to  his  carriage.  We  pro- 
duce probably  per  capita  one  thousand  times  more 
in  weight  of  ready  made  clothing,  Irish  lace,  arti- 
ficial flowers,  terra  cotta,  movie  films,  telephones, 
and  printed  matter,  than  these  Florentines  did, 
but  we  have  with  our  100,000,000  inhabitants  yet 
to  produce  that  little  town,  her  Dante,  her  Andrea 
del  Sarto,  her  Michael  Angelo,  her  Leonardo  da 
Vinci,  her  Savonarola,  her  Giotto,  —  or  the  group 
who  followed  Giotto's  picture.  Florence  had  a 
marvelous  energy-release  experience.  All  our  in- 
dustrial formalism,  our  conventionalized  young 
manhood,  our  schemitized  universities,  are  in- 
struments of  balk  and  thwart,  are  machines  to 
produce  protesting  abnormality,  to  block  effi- 
ciency. 

So  the  problem  of  industrial  labor  is  one  with 
the  problem  of  the  discontented  business  man, 
the  indifferent  student,  the  unhappy  wife,  the 
immoral  minister,  —  it  is  one  of  mal-adjustment 
between  a  fixed  human  nature  and  a  carelessly 
ordered  world.  The  result  is  suffering,  insanity, 
racial  perversion,  and  danger.  The  final  cure  is 
gaining  acceptance  for  a  new  standard  of  nor- 
mality. The  first  step  towards  this  is  to  break 
down  the  mores-inhibitions  to  free  experimental 
thinking. 


II 

THE  CASUAL  LABORER 

I.  The  Wheatland  Episode 

Labor  history,  more  than  any  other  subdivision 
of  economic  history,  seems  to  be  written  in  terms 
of  impressive  events.  In  August,  1913,  in  the  hop 
fields  of  Wheatland,  California,  such  an  event  took 
place :  an  unusual  strike,  as  strange  as  any  in  the 
annals  of  western  labor.  Men  were  killed,  the 
country  side  cast  into  hysteria,  the  militia  called 
out,  and  the  State  was  made  to  realize  overnight 
that  San  Francisco  unionism  was  not  the  sum 
total  of  her  labor  problem.  California  long  had 
known  that  nowhere  in  the  country  was  there  as 
unionized  a  city  as  San  Francisco,  that  wages  were 
high  even  as  compared  with  the  New  York  Build- 
ing Trades,  that  the  Exposition  had  been  built  as 
a  closed  shop,  and  that  a  candidate,  be  it  for 
Governor,  who  was  lukewarm  regarding  the  pol- 
icies of  organized  labor,  had  a  remote  chance  of 
election.     To   CaUfornians   this   for   more   than 

61 


62  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

twenty  years  had  been  their  labor  question.  With 
the  dramatic  entry  of  the  hop  pickers  on  the  stage 
there  began  such  a  widespread  and  agitated  dis- 
cussion of  the  condition  of  the  state's  casual 
workers,  that  the  two  years  of  1913  and  1914  will 
be  known  in  western  labor  history  as  the  "period 
of  the  migratory  worker." 

The  story  of  the  Wheatland  hop  pickers  riot  is 
as  simple  as  the  facts  of  it  are  new  and  naive  in 
strike  histories.  Twenty-eight  hundred  pickers 
were  camped  on  a  treeless  hill  which  was  part  of 
the  Durst  ranch,  the  largest  single  employer  of 
agricultural  labor  in  the  state.  Some  were  in 
tents,  some  in  topless  squares  of  sacking  or  with 
piles  of  straw.  Eight  small  toilets  had  been 
erected  and  four  days  use  had  made  them  revolt- 
ingly  filthy.  No  toilets  had  been  allotted  to 
women.  There  was  no  organization  for  sanita- 
tion, no  garbage  disposal.  The  temperature  dur- 
ing the  week  of  the  riot  had  remained  near  105 
degrees  and  though  the  wells  were  a  mile  from 
■  where  the  men,  women,  and  children  were  pick- 
ing, and  their  bags  could  not  be  left  for  fear  of 
theft  of  the  hops,  no  water  was  sent  into  the 
fields.  A  lemonade  wagon  appeared  at  the  end 
of  the  week,  later  found  to  be  a  concession  granted 


THE   CASUAL  LABORER  63 

to  a  cousin  of  the  ranch  owner.  Local  Wheatland 
stores  were  forbidden  to  send  delivery  wagons  to 
the  camp  grounds.  It  developed  in  the  state  in- 
vestigation that  the  owner  of  the  ranch  received 
half  of  the  net  profit  earned  by  an  alleged  inde- 
pendent grocery  store  which  had  been  granted  the 
"grocery  concession"  and  was  located  in  the  center 
of  the  camp  ground. 

An  examination  of  the  wage  system  of  this  ranch 
for  both  the  seasons  of  1912  and  1913  showed 
an  interesting  phenomenon.  Each  day  there  ex- 
isted four  possible  wage  rates.  If  many  hop 
pickers  had  drifted  in  by  wagon  and  train  and  foot 
during  the  previous  day,  and  as  a  result  an  un- 
employed crowd  hung  about  the  check  window 
at  sunrise,  then  90  cents  per  hundred  pounds  was 
hung  up  as  the  piece  price  for  hop  picking.  If 
there  were  unemployed  still  desirous  for  work 
even  after  this  wage  announcement,  and  a  surplus 
hung  about  the  window  the  following  morning, 
it  was  the  custom  to  lower  the  wages  to  85  cents 
per  hundred  pounds.  Like  the  immigrant  at  Ellis 
Island,  the  hop  picker  arrives  at  the  job  without 
a  money  reserve.  The  dictator  of  the  wage  policy 
of  this  ranch  explained  that  if  the  pickers  grew 
disgruntled  at  either  rate  of  pay  or  the  average 


64  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

income  and  drifted  away,  leaving  work  checks  un- 
called-for, then  the  wage  scale  would  be  raised  to 
95  cents  or  even  a  dollar.  There  had  been  certain 
days  in  the  past,  he  said,  when  a  labor  exodus  had 
forced  the  price  to  as  high  as  $1.10  before  the 
workers  would  flow  in  and  allow  the  rate  to  sink 
to  a  more  profitable  level.  In  order  to  counter- 
act any  wavering  in  allegiance  to  the  job,  10  per 
cent  of  the  gross  wages  was  held  out  by  this  ranch 
to  be  paid  to  those  who  remained  through  the 
season.  The  ranch  owner  argued  that  this  was  a 
real  bonus,  because  so  many  left  before  the  season 
was  out  that  they,  the  deserters,  fixed  the  real 
average  wage;  therefore  those  who  remained  to 
receive  the  ten  per  cent  were  paid  just  that 
amount  more  than  the  average.  In  a  private  hear- 
ing before  the  Governor,  an  attempt  to  establish 
whether  a  bonus  should  be  taken  from  the  wage 
fund  or  the  profit  fund  was  without  success.  Pos- 
sibly this  failure  illustrates  a  certain  general  con- 
fusion upon  the  issue.  To  uphold  this  wage 
system  it  was  necessary  to  advertise  throughout 
California  and  in  southern  Oregon  and  western 
Nevada  that  everyone  who  applied  on  or  before 
the  day  picking  was  to  begin  could  obtain  a  job. 
It  is  difiicult  to  estimate  the  vast  number  of  mi- 


THE   CASUAL  LABORER  65 

gratory  workers  who  make  this  ranch  a  short  stop- 
ping place  at  some  time  in  the  five  weeks  of  hop 
picking. 

The  pickers  in  August,  1913,  were  drawn  from 
three  sources.  About  a  third  came  from  Cali- 
fornia towns  and  cities,  men  and  boys  who  form 
the  great  class  of  town  casuals,  and  the  wives  and 
children  from  various  stratas  of  the  middle  class. 
Another  third  were  families  from  the  Sierra  foot- 
hills, quasi-gypsies,  with  carts  or  ramshackle 
wagons.  The  final  third  were  the  migratories,  — 
the  pure  hobo,  or  his  California  exemplar,  the 
"fruit  tramp";  Hindus;  and  a  large  body  of  Jap- 
anese. There  was  much  old-time  California  blood 
in  this  group,  and  even  if  the  individuals  had 
come  upon  evil  economic  days,  their  idea  of  per- 
sonal dignity  and  their  devotion  to  certain  strange 
western  "rights"  had  remained  most  positive. 
They  began  coming  to  Wheatland  on  Tuesday, 
and  by  Sunday  the  irritation  over  the  wage  scale, 
the  absence  of  water  in  the  fields,  plus  the  per- 
sistent heat  and  the  increasing  indignity  of  the 
camp,  had  resulted  in  mass  meetings,  violent  talk, 
and  a  general  strike. 

The  ranch  owner,  a  nervous  man,  was  harassed 
by  the  rush  of  work  brought  on  by  the  too  rapidly 


66  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

ripening  hops,  and  indignant  at  the  jeers  and  cat- 
calls which  greeted  his  appearance  near  the  meet- 
ings of  the  pickers.  Confused  with  a  crisis  out- 
side his  slender  social  philosophy,  he  acted  true  to 
his  tradition  and  perhaps  his  type,  and  called  on 
a  sheriff's  posse.  What  industrial  relationship  had 
existed  was  too  insecure  to  stand  such  a  procedure. 
It  disappeared  entirely,  leaving  in  control  the  in- 
stincts and  vagaries  of  a  mob  on  one  hand,  and 
great  apprehension  and  inexperience  on  the  other. 
As  if  a  stage  had  been  set,  the  posse  arrived  in 
automobiles  at  the  instant  when  the  officially 
"wanted"  strike  leader  was  addressing  a  mass 
meeting  of  excited  men,  women,  and  children. 
After  a  short  and  typical  period  of  skirmishing 
and  the  minor  and  major  events  of  arresting  a 
person  under  such  circumstances,  a  member  of 
the  posse  standing  outside  fired  a  double  barrelled 
shot  gun  over  the  heads  of  the  crowd,  "to  sober 
them,"  as  he  explained  it.  Four  men  were  killed, 
two  of  the  posse  and  two  of  the  strikers,  the  posse 
fled  in  their  automobiles  to  the  country  seat,  and 
all  that  night  the  roads  out  of  Wheatland  were 
filled  with  pickers  leaving  the  camp.  Eight 
months  later  two  hop  pickers,  proven  to  be  the 
leaders  of  the  strike  and  its  agitation,  were  con- 


THE   CASUAL   LABORER  67 

victed  of  murder  in  the  first  degree  and  sentenced 
to  life  imprisonment.  Their  appeal  for  a  new 
trial  was  denied. 

Dramatic  because  of  the  deaths  and  its  sudden- 
ness, sordid  in  its  details,  in  some  way  the  episode 
caught  and  held  the  attention  of  the  state.  It  is 
impossible  to  understand  California's  ensuing  in- 
spection on  the  subject  of  its  peculiar  labor  prob- 
lem without  a  description  of  the  Wheatland 
episode.  This  brought  the  state  to  some  degree  of 
self-realization.  The  Federal  Commission  on  In- 
dustrial Relations  and  the  State  Commission  of 
Immigration  and  Housing  turned  their  initial  in- 
terest in  the  significance  of  the  hop  pickers  riot  to 
the  problem  of  the  migratory  worker  in  the  west 
thus  dramatically  introduced.  The  riot  in  the 
end  served  many  purposes,  one  of  which  was  to 
lend  dignity  to  the  I.  W.  W.  in  a  very  appreciable 
manner.  Sympathy  with  syndicalism  and  ultra 
radical  theories  appeared  in  the  most  unexpected 
places.  A  group  of  women  who  had  been  identi- 
fied with  the  most  notable  agitations  in  the  Cali- 
fornia feminist  movement  went  from  trade  union 
to  union  begging  for  funds  to  defend  the  indicted 
hop  pickers.  It  was  disclosed  that  many  trade 
unionists  in  San  Francisco  were  interested  in  the 


68  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

I.  W.  W.,  some  going  so  far  as  to  have  cards  in 
both  organizations.  It  was  disclosed  in  the  trial 
that  certain  suspects  among  the  hop  pickers  had 
been  held  in  jail  many  weeks  without  being 
charged  or  given  a  court  hearing,  a  record  of  their 
arrest  existing  only  on  a  so-called  "secret  blotter." 
This  fact,  in  addition  to  an  unexplainable  par- 
ticipation of  a  private  detective  agency  in  the 
case,  was  a  focus  for  very  warm  opinion.  The 
county  authorities'  traditional  treatment  of  va- 
grants and  migratory  workers  with  "no  visible 
means  of  support"  gave  a  sickening  picture,  and 
an  uncomfortable  hint  of  a  vast  amount  of  cruelty 
and  injustice.  Any  romance  which  the  Far  West 
had  thrown  around  a  sheriff's  posse  was  rudely 
stripped  from  the  institution,  and  the  prophecy 
was  accepted  that  if  the  posse  be  the  police  power 
in  any  period  of  agricultural  strikes  and  disorder, 
a  large  measure  of  dangerous  inefficiency  is  as- 
sured. The  most  important  result  of  the  riot  was 
the  study  of  the  economics  of  the  labor  field  thus 
suddenly  disclosed ;  and  it  is  the  results  of  this  re- 
search to  which  we  now  turn. 


THE   CASUAL  LABORER  69 

II.  The  California  Casual 

California  is  a  natural  economic  entity,  insu- 
lated from  the  rest  of  the  world  by  an  ocean  on 
the  west,  a  desert  south,  and  high  mountains  north 
and  east.  This  gives  a  fair  basis  for  isolating  the 
labor  problem  to  be  considered  under  the  present 
caption.  The  census  shows  the  existence  in  the 
state  of  some  175,000  workers  in  the  casual-using 
occupations.  Of  these,  72,157  are  farm  laborers 
"working  out."  A  dependable  estimate  of  the 
number  of  laborers  in  labor  camps  of  the  state  at 
the  time  of  maximum  population  is  75,000.  The 
State  Immigration  Commission  gathered  statistics 
for  876  labor  camps  with  a  capacity  of  60,813 
workers.  There  has  been  a  noteworthy  industrial 
and  agricultural  specialization  by  districts  in  the 
state.  Mining  and  the  two  diverse  kinds  of  coast 
lumbering,  i.e.  the  Sierra  pine  belt  and  the  lower 
lying  redwood  belt,  have  given  three  detached 
labor  fields.  Agricultural  California  today  is 
spotted  with  districts  devoted  to  highly  special- 
ized and  seasonal  crops,  running  geographically 
from  the  oranges  of  the  south  through  the  walnuts 
of  Santa  Barbara,  the  raisins  of  Fresno,  the  arti- 
chokes of  Half  Moon  Bay,  the  berries  of  Santa 


70  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

Clara,  to  the  early  peach  and  the  olive  regions  of 
the  northern  Sacramento  Valley.  Each  town  is 
a  specialist  and  each  Chamber  of  Commerce  a 
"booster  club"  for  a  single  product.  This  nature- 
ordained  agricultural  specialization  is  the  basic 
cause  of  the  existence  of  the  California  migratory 
worker.  Another  important  factor  is  the  circum- 
stance that  California  for  the  last  five  years  has 
been  the  scene  of  more  railway  and  highway  con- 
struction than  any  state  in  the  West.  Thus  there 
was  added  to  the  local  casuals  a  new  element,  the 
middle  West  railway  laborer,  the  "construction 
work  hobo."  He  has  transplanted  his  personal 
habits  and  labor  psychology  into  western  soil 
without  western  adaptation. 

In  1913-14  an  investigation  was  carried  on  in 
California  which  utilized  schedules  covering  222 
typical  migratory  workers,  and  from  the  resulting 
report  the  following  generalizations  appear  well- 
based.  Nearly  half  (48  per  cent)  were  native 
Americans.  The  statistics  of  the  Chicago  Munic- 
ipal Lodging  House  for  1910-12,  covering  30,888 
cases,  of  whom  60  per  cent  were  estimated  as  mi- 
gratories,  give  the  percentage  of  "Americans"  as 
53.5.  Of  the  California  number  investigated,  76 
per  cent  were  unmarried  and  7.1  per  cent  had 


THE    CASUAL   LABORER  71 

abandoned  their  wives.  Four  years  of  Chicago 
statistics  show  nearly  90  per  cent  unmarried.  Of 
the  222, 47  per  cent  were  under  thirty  years  of  age. 
A  study  in  Chicago  of  38,256  casuals  in  1910-12 
showed  44  per  cent  below  thirty  years  of  age.  In 
California  33  per  cent  were  between  thirty  and 
forty  years  of  age,  in  Chicago,  27  per  cent.  Of  the 
30,888  examined  in  Chicago,  60  per  cent  were  un- 
skilled; 52  per  cent  of  the  California  group  ad- 
mitted no  trade  training  whatsoever.  Of  the  Chi- 
cago group,  but  21  per  cent  had  been  long  enough 
in  that  city  to  establish  a  legal  residence.  Of  the 
222,  73  per  cent  had  worked  at  their  last  regular 
job  in  some  locality  other  than  the  one  in  which 
they  were  examined.  Twenty-one  per  cent  had 
had  their  last  job  outside  the  state.  Forty-one 
per  cent  had  been  casual  laborers  less  than  six 
years,  and  36  per  cent  between  six  and  fifteen 
years.  The  per  cent  who  admitted  their  inten- 
tion of  "floating"  with  no  idea  of  looking  for 
steady  work  was  67.  Thirty-five  per  cent  left  their 
last  job  voluntarily.  This  hints  at  a  conclusion 
which  finds  support  in  all  the  studies  of  the  casual, 
the  tramp,  or  the  vagabond :  that  casualty  begets 
a  labor  type  permanently  under  normal.  There 
is  today  sufficient  evidence  from  various  quarters 


72  THE  CASUAL  LABORER 

to  make  this  grave  charge  against  seasonal  work. 
For  instance,  in  Belgium  the  statistics  of  ad- 
missions in  1908  to  The  Wortel  Beggars  Depot 
shows  1,222  committed  for  the  first  time,  435  for 
the  second,  261  for  the  third,  163  for  the  fourth, 
and  717  for  the  fifth  time  or  oftener. 

Some  of  the  more  intimate  statistics  of  the  Cali- 
fornia group  are  suggestive:  22  per  cent  had  be- 
longed to  a  lodge;  29  per  cent  had  been  members 
of  a  Protestant  Church,  18  per  cent  of  the 
Catholic ;  48  per  cent  gave  no  preference  for  a  po- 
litical party,  yet  37  per  cent  advocated  the  com- 
plete destruction  of  the  present  political  system. 
Despite  the  Wheatland  riot  and  the  extensive 
propaganda  of  the  I.  W.  W.  among  this  very  labor 
class,  but  8  per  cent  belonged  to  that  organization. 
Forty-one  per  cent  had  ceased  writing  or  main- 
taining any  connection  with  relatives,  and  86  per 
cent  said  no  one  was  dependent  upon  them. 
Somewhat  similar  evidence  is  the  fact  that  out  of 
thirty  suicides  in  the  men's  cheap  lodging  houses 
in  San  Francisco,  in  the  month  of  December,  1913, 
but  two  left  behind  any  word  as  to  their  source  or 
relatives.  The  schedule  examiners  reported  that 
74  per  cent  were  in  good  or  fair  physical  condition, 
and  24  per  cent  sick.  The  Chicago  statistics  cover- 


THE   CASUAL  LABORER  73 

ing  130,053  cases  reported  84.8  per  cent  "able- 
bodied."  Seventy-seven  per  cent  of  the  222  in 
California  were  alcoholic,  and  26  per  cent  ad- 
mitted a  jail  record.  The  Department  of  Educa- 
tion of  Stanford  University  tested  two  hundred 
unemployed  of  the  migratory  labor  class  and  al- 
most an  even  25  per  cent  were  found  feeble- 
minded. Binet  tests  made  in  1913  by  the  Eco- 
nomic Department  of  Reed  CoUege,  Portland, 
covering  107  cases  taken  from  the  unemployed 
army  showed  the  percentage  of  feeble-minded  to 
be  26. 

A  California  state  official  of  long  technical  ex- 
perience, whose  duties  bring  him  in  direct  contact 
with  the  young  vagrant,  believes  that  he  has  the 
data  to  prove  a  widespread  practice  of  homo- 
sexuality among  the  migratory  laborers.  Inves- 
tigation reports  of  a  most  dependable  and  tech- 
nical nature  show  that  in  Cahfornia  lumber  camps 
a  sex  perversion  within  the  entire  group  is  as  de- 
veloped and  recognized  as  the  well  known  similar 
practice  in  prisons  and  reformatories.  Often  the 
men  sent  out  from  the  employment  agencies  are 
without  blankets  or  even  sufficient  clothing,  and 
they  are  forced  to  sleep  packed  together  for  the 
sake  of  warmth.    Investigations  are  beginning  to 


74  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

show  that  there  are  social  dangers  which  a  group 
of  demoralized,  womenless  men  may  engender 
under  such  conditions  of  greater  menace  than  the 
stereotyped  ill  effects  of  insanitation  and  malnu- 
trition. 

III.  The  Labor  Camps  and  the  Labor  Turnover 

An  investigation  of  the  labor  camps  of  the  state 
was  carried  out  in  the  summer  of  1914  by  the 
State  Commission  of  Immigration  and  Housing 
under  the  direction  of  the  present  writer.  Eight 
hundred  and  seventy-six  camps  were  examined  in 
which  at  some  time  in  the  summer  60,813  men 
were  to  be  housed.  Of  these  camps  297  (34  per 
cent),  holding  21,577  workers,  were  pronounced 
in  good  condition;  316  (36  per  cent),  housing 
22,382  men,  fair;  and  263  (30  per  cent),  housing 
16,854  men,  were  so  insanitary  and  destitute  of 
essentials  that  they  were  entered  as  bad.  In  this 
investigation  "fair"  was  below  the  minimum  es- 
tablished by  the  State  Board  of  Health.  Of  the 
berry  camps  investigated,  68  per  cent  had  toilets 
statistically  noted  as  "filthy."  The  toilets  were  in 
this  same  condition  in  37  per  cent  of  the  fruit 
camps,  69  per  cent  of  the  grape  camps,  38  per 


THE   CASUAL   LABORER  75 

cent  of  the  highway  camps,  62  per  cent  of  the  135 
hop  camps,  42  per  cent  of  the  lumber  camps 
(though  they  could  be  described  as  permanent  in 
many  cases),  37  per  cent  of  the  mining  camps,  and 
61  per  cent  of  the  ranch  camps.  The  large  cor- 
poration made  an  interesting  break  in  this  recital, 
for  but  24  per  cent  of  the  railway  camps  were 
"filthy" ;  and  in  the  oil  fields,  where  Standard  Oil 
and  The  Union  Oil  Company  are  largely  in  con- 
trol, the  percentage  was  27.  In  29  per  cent  of  the 
construction  and  25  per  cent  of  the  highway 
camps  there  were  no  toilets  whatever.  For  all 
the  876  camps,  13  per  cent  had  no  toilets,  31  per 
cent  maintained  filthy  toilets,  20.4  per  cent  fairly 
sanitary,  23.4  per  cent  sanitary  and  fly  screened. 
Among  all  camps  40  per  cent  provided  no  bathing 
facilities  at  all,  39  per  cent  offered  tubs  or 
showers.  Of  the  537  labor  camps  using  horses,  27 
per  cent  allowed  the  manure  to  accumulate  in  the 
vicinity  of  the  kitchen  and  mess  tent.  Thirty- 
five  per  cent  of  the  kitchen  and  mess  tents  had  no 
screens.  Twenty-five  per  cent  of  the  camps  had 
no  garbage  disposal,  the  kitchen  refuse  being  al- 
lowed to  accumulate  indefinitely.  It  is  a  proverb 
in  the  health  service  of  the  two  great  valleys  that 
every  labor  camp  has  its  typhoid  carrier.    Certain 


76  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

fruit  towns  expect  their  ten  cases  of  typhoid  per 
year. 

It  will  be  seen  that  the  camp  conditions  at 
Wheatland  constituted  no  isolated  case.  The 
early  California  population  was  a  pioneer  com- 
munity and  their  complete  acceptance  of  individ- 
ualism gave  little  room  for  social  realizations. 
This  doctrine  remains  the  current  philosophy  of 
the  country  districts,  and  despite  the  statewide  in- 
fluence of  the  social  legislation  of  the  Johnson  ad- 
ministration, the  inherited  psychology  of  the 
employer  of  casual  labor  remains  the  same. 

Resistance  by  the  worker  to  an  employer's 
labor  policy  takes  one  of  two  forms:  either  an 
open  and  formal  revolt,  such  as  a  strike;  or  an 
instinctive  and  often  unconscious  exercise  of  the 
"strike  in  detail,"  —  simply  drifting  off  the  job. 
The  latter  phenomenon  is  called  by  the  employers 
"undependable  labor,"  and  ideas  concerning  this 
willful  unreliability  constitute  the  layman's  usual 
version  of  the  California  labor  problem.  In  the 
light  of  the  recent  investigations  it  would  appear 
that  the  California  employer  obtains  the  labor  to 
whom  his  conditions  of  employment  are  attrac- 
tive. A  study  first  of  the  "strike  in  detail"  in  the 
state  is  convincing. 


THE   CASUAL  LABORER  77 

Statistics  were  obtained  from  the  books  of  the 
Southern  Pacific  and  Northwestern  Pacific,  the 
two  systems  carrying  on  the  most  important  rail- 
way construction  in  the  west. 


Northwestern  Pacific 

In  a  camp  called  the  "Tunnel  Camp,"  during 
the  five  months  from  January  to  May,  1914,  529 
men  worked  7414  days,  an  average  of  14  days  per 
man.    Following  are  the  statistics  in  detail : 

Jan.  133  men  worked  2169  days,  average  16.3  days  per  man. 

Feb.  107  "    "    1554   "     "  14.5   "   "   " 

Mar.  138  "    "    1471   "     "  10.6   "   "   " 

Apr.  90  "    "    1153  "  "  12.8   "   "   " 

May  61  "    "    1067   "     "  17.5   "   "   " 

In  the  "Grade  Camp"  of  the  same  company  ad- 
joining the  "Tunnel  Camp,"  during  the  seven 
months  from  June  to  December,  764  men  worked 
7723  days,  an  average  of  10.1  days  per  man. 

June  68  men  worked  825  days,  average  12.1  days  per  man. 

July  82  "  "  765  "  "  9.3  "  "  " 

Aug.  73  "  "  944  "  "  13.3  "  "  " 

Sept.  56  "  "  850  "  "  152  "  "  " 

Oct.  171  "  "  1599  "  "  9.3  "  "  " 

Nov.  166  "  "  1612  "  "  9.7  "  "  " 

Dec.  146  "  "  1128  "  "  7.6  "  "  " 

In  the  year  1913  the  two  adjoining  camps  had 
employed  1293  men  working  15,137  days,  an 
average  of  11.7  days  work  per  man. 


78  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

Southern  Pacific 
In  the  "Grade  Camp"  of  this  company,  statis- 
tics covering  March  10  to  July  8,  show  480  men 
working  4145  days,  an  average  of  8.6  days  per 
man. 

Mar.  10  days,  74  men  worked  250  days. 

Apr.  136  "     "   1262   "   average  9.3  days. 

May  180  "     "   1459   "     "   8.0   " 

June  164  "     "   1424   "     "   8.7   " 

July  8  days,  68  "     "    234  " 

These  figures  bear  out  the  employment  agency 
proverb  that  there  are  three  crews  of  men  con- 
nected with  the  job,  one  coming,  one  going,  one 
on  the  job. 

A  big  dried  fruit  packing  firm  in  Fresno  re- 
ported that  to  keep  up  a  skilled  crew  of  93  men, 
41  per  week  had  to  be  hired  throughout  the 
season.  A  large  ranch  with  a  fruit  season  of  nine 
weeks  reported  a  monthly  turnover  of  245  per 
cent.  One  power  house  construction  job  in  the 
Sierras  gave  figures  showing  that  to  maintain  a 
force  of  950,  over  1500  men  a  month  were  shipped 
to  them. 

It  seems  that  when  a  laborer  has  earned  a  sum 
which  road  tradition  has  fixed  as  affluence,  he 
quits.  This  sum  is  known  as  a  "jungle  stake," 
and  once  it  is  earned  the  hobo  discipline  calls  upon 


THE   CASUAL  LABORER  79 

the  casual  to  resort  to  a  camp  under  a  railroad 
bridge  or  along  some  stream,  a  "jungle,"  as  the 
vernacular  terms  it,  and  live  upon  this  "stake" 
till  it  is  gone.  Thereupon  he  goes  north  to  a  new 
maturing  crop.  Weeks  spent  among  the  casuals 
by  two  investigators  lead  them  to  attach  great 
importance  to  this  custom.  In  the  words  of  a  re- 
port, "The  sum  which  usage  prescribes  that  a 
jungle  stake  should  be,  taken  in  relation  to  the 
wage  in  the  district,  fixes  the  casual's  endurance 
on  the  job.  Today  between  ten  and  fifteen  dollars 
is  a  proper  stake."  The  statistics  of  the  222  Cali- 
fornia casuals  examined  show  that  but  29  per 
cent  left  their  last  job  because  work  gave  out. 
Taking  into  calculation  both  the  tendency  to  drift 
away  from  a  fairly  permanent  job,  as  shown  by 
the  construction  work  figures,  and  also  the  normal 
short  duration  of  the  fruit  or  harvesting  work, 
such  generalizations  as  the  following,  gathered  by 
the  investigators,  seem  to  be  dependable.  The 
duration  of  a  job  is : 

In  lumber  camps 15-30  days 

"  construction  work    10     " 

"  harvesting    7    " 

"  mining    60    " 

"  canning  30    " 

"  orchard  work 7-10    " 


80  THE  CASUAL  LABORER 

IV.  Winter  Unemployment;  the  Revolt 

California  is  a  state  of  summer  employment. 
The  seasonal  activity  of  the  canneries,  the  state's 
principal  industry,  illustrates  this  fully.  In 
August,  1909,  California  canneries  employed 
16,047;  in  February,  but  2781.  Of  the  150,000 
migratory  workers  employed  in  the  summer,  a 
mass  of  direct  and  indirect  information  indicates 
that  fully  100,000  face  sustained  winter  unem- 
ployment. Driven  out  of  the  lumber  and  power 
construction  camps  and  mines  of  the  Sierras  by 
the  snow,  out  of  highway  camps  by  the  regular 
winter  shut  down,  and  out  of  agriculture  by  its 
closed  winter  season,  with  a  winter's  stake  esti- 
mated to  be  on  the  average  $30,  these  tens  of 
thousands  "lie  up"  for  from  five  to  six  months  in 
the  cities  of  the  coast.  A  San  Francisco  canvas 
of  the  ten  and  fifteen  cent  lodging  houses  and  the 
cheap  hotels  of  the  foreign  quarter,  made  in  De- 
cember, 1913,  showed  that  over  forty  thousand 
were  "lying  up"  in  that  city.  A  Los  Angeles  es- 
timate gave  twenty-five  thousand;  Sacramento 
showed  approximately  three  thousand;  and  im- 
portant additions  came  from  Stockton,  Fresno, 
and  Bakersfield.    The  winter  of  1913  was  a  hard 


THE   CASUAL   LABORER  81 

one  for  the  lodging  house  man.  His  stake  was 
small,  and  by  October  there  were  hungry  men  on 
the  San  Francisco  streets  and  talk  of  a  bread  line. 
One  of  those  odd  creatures  who  inhabit  the  border 
land  of  labor,  "General"  Kelly,  appeared,  and  in 
two  weeks  had  organized  an  unemployed  "army" 
whose  enlistment  soon  reached  two  thousand. 
The  recruits  were  a  fair  cross  section  of  the  thou- 
sands of  migratories  lying  up  in  the  city:  those 
who  were  penniless  and  evicted  from  lodging 
houses,  the  younger  gentry  looking  for  adventure, 
the  quasi-yegg  looking  for  disorder,  the  border  line 
defectives  attracted  by  the  military  form,  and 
lastly  the  normal  casuals  weary  of  monotonous 
privation.  After  a  few  weeks  the  inaction  caused 
the  more  restless  and  able  to  drift  away.  By  De- 
cember, through  this  segregation,  the  "army"  had 
become  a  human  scrap  heap  and  the  wet  and  dis- 
consolate camp  on  a  vacant  lot  a  social  caricature. 
With  doubtful  generosity  the  city  turned  over  to 
the  army  a  vacant  building  near  the  City  Hall. 
The  use  of  this  building  is  best  described  in  the 
words  of  an  investigator  of  the  State  Immigration 
and  Housing  Commission: 

"The  building  runs  from  Market  Street  to  City 
Hall  Avenue,  containing  stores  on  the  ground  floor 


82  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

and  fifty  rooms  of  the  Marshall  Hotel  on  the 
second  floor.  Both  the  stores  and  the  hotel  have 
been  dismantled  and  are  vacant. 

"According  to  instructions,  your  investigator 
arrived  at  the  building  at  11 :  30  p.  m.,  Wednesday, 
February  18.  There  was  a  very  heavy  rain  fall- 
ing at  the  time  and  the  men  were  pouring  into 
the  place  at  all  the  entrances.  In  the  store,  No. 
1500  Market  Street,  132  men  were  already  sleep- 
ing side  by  side  in  rows  along  the  floor,  and  several 
were  standing  by  the  stove.  These  latter  were 
soaking  wet,  and  a  volume  of  steam  was  arising 
from  their  clothing.  The  air  of  the  place  was  foul 
and  stifling,  all  the  doors  and  windows  being 
closed  in  order  to  shield  the  sleepers  from  the  cold 
air.  Newspapers  constituted  the  bedding  of  the 
sleepers.  In  the  next  vacant  store  were  187  men 
sleeping  under  like  conditions. 

"In  the  store  which  occupied  the  City  Hall 
Avenue  corner  were  211  men.  Here  the  men  were 
sleeping  upon  the  window  platforms  and  so  closely 
packed  upon  the  floor  as  to  make  passage  between 
them  impossible.  Seventeen  men  occupied  the 
floor  space  of  the  main  entrance  of  the  up-stairs 
section,  leaving  barely  enough  room  for  persons 
to  get  through  the  doors.    Three  men  were  sleep- 


THE   CASUAL  LABORER  83 

ing  on  the  middle  stairway  landing.  Lying  on  the 
floor  of  the  upper  hallways  of  the  hotel  were  138 
men,  all  using  newspapers  for  bedding.  The  men 
lay  with  their  clothes  on,  with  the  exception  of 
their  shoes,  which  were  utilized  for  pillows.  There 
are  50  rooms  on  the  second  floor,  and  they  aver- 
aged 14  men  on  the  floor  of  each  room.  —  Some 
of  the  rooms  were  so  closely  packed  with  men  that 
it  was  impossible  to  open  the  door.  They  were 
lying  in  every  shape  and  direction  upon  the  floors 
of  every  passage  and  hallway  of  the  house.  In 
round  numbers  there  were  700  men  in  the  upper 
stories  and  over  500  in  the  vacant  stores  of  the 
ground  floor,  a  total  of  over  1,200  men  with  a 
constant  stream  of  new-comers.  A  few  men  were 
standing  in  the  shelter  of  the  doorways,  and  in 
conversation  they  stated  that  they  were  driven 
out  of  the  building  by  the  odor  and  vermin.  One 
of  these  men  had  been  a  resident  of  San  Francisco 
for  20  years,  and  stated  that  this  is  his  first  ex- 
perience of  being  without  a  bed  and  meal.  He 
further  stated  that  people  he  knew  were  unable  to 
aid  or  give  him  credit  until  he  obtained  work.  An- 
other man,  who  is  a  discharged  U.  S.  Army  man, 
stated  that  he  was  living  in  a  tent  with  Com]oany 
M  of  Kelly's  Army  at  Fifth  and  Mission  Streets, 


84  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

and  had  come  over  to  seek  shelter  owing  to  the 
heavy  rain,  but  that  he  was  going  back  to  stay  in 
the  tent  in  preference  to  accepting  the  city's  hospi- 
tality. This  man  accompanied  the  investigator 
through  the  Marshall  Hotel.  Lying  directly  at  the 
head  of  the  main  stairway  was  a  Mexican  in  the 
last  stages  of  consumption.  He  was  coughing  and 
spitting  all  over  the  floor  in  his  vicinity,  the  spu- 
tum making  a  disgusting  and  sickening  sight. 
Men  could  be  heard  coughing  in  all  parts  of  the 
building,  and  a  number  were  sleeping  in  their 
rain-soaked  clothing.  The  air  was  putrid  and 
left  a  nauseating  odor  upon  contact  with  the 
fresh  air." 

A  few  weeks  later  the  Army  began  its  demoral- 
ized march  on  the  National  Capital.  It  left  San 
Francisco  by  ferry,  landed  in  Oakland,  was  passed 
rapidly  by  armed  Oaklanders  through  the  city  on 
to  Richmond.  Here  the  mayor  of  that  exasper- 
ated town  organized  transportation  and  passed 
the  hungry  legion  on  to  Sacramento  by  train. 
This  town,  after  a  day  of  fruitless  cogitation,  de- 
scended on  the  camp  with  pick  handles  and  fire 
hose,  drove  the  army  across  the  river,  and  burned 
the  blankets  and  camp  equipment.  Guards  with 
rifles  kept  the  bridge.    The  writer  had  the  oppor- 


THE   CASUAL   LABORER  85 

tunity  of  remaining  most  of  four  days  with  this 
now  broken  and  dispirited  body  of  men,  studying 
some  fifty-odd  closely.  They  were  willing  to  talk, 
many  being  in  a  highly  excited  and  uncontrolled 
state.  Over  half,  through  either  long  malnutrition 
and  privation,  or  through  constitutional  defects, 
had  reached  an  undeniably  abnormal  mental  con- 
dition. There  were  defectives  even  among  the 
"officers,"  and  much  of  their  "strategy"  against 
the  businesslike  riflemen  at  the  bridge  was  curi- 
ously like  the  scheming  of  small  boys.  The  suf- 
fering and  helplessness,  the  pitiful  inefficiency  of 
this  broken  mob,  the  bitter  humor  of  the  feeble 
military  form  to  which  it  still  clung,  made  the 
entire  picture  an  economic  cartoon.  It  was  im- 
possible to  be  there  and  not  get  a  vivid  impression 
of  a  class  inferior,  unequal,  and  with  fewer  rights 
than  normal  American  tradition  seems  to  promise 
to  its  citizens. 

Within  three  weeks  the  Army,  rained  on  and 
starved  out,  melted  away,  and  its  members  joined 
that  restless  migration  into  which  the  first  spring 
days  had  stirred  the  lodging  house  population. 
The  Army's  psychology  had  dissolved  into  the 
larger  psychology  of  the  migratory  150,000,  and 
its  winter's  experience  added  to  that  collection  of 


86  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

strange  complexes  which  make  up  the  California 
casual's  mob  mind. 

There  is  here,  beyond  a  doubt,  a  great  laboring 
population  experiencing  a  high  suppression  of 
normal  instincts  and  traditions.  There  can  be  no 
greater  perversion  of  a  desirable  existence  than 
this  insecure,  under-nourished,  wandering  life, 
with  its  sordid  sex  expression  and  reckless  and 
rare  pleasures.  Such  a  life  leads  to  one  of  two 
consequences:  either  a  sinking  of  the  class  to  a 
low  and  hopeless  level,  where  they  become 
through  irresponsible  conduct  and  economic  in- 
efficiency a  charge  upon  society ;  or  the  result  will 
be  revolt  and  guerilla  labor  warfare. 

The  Wheatland  strike  was  the  latter.  This  was 
engineered  by  the  I.  W.  W.;  and  though  there 
were  but  a  handful  of  members  and  a  single  leader 
at  the  Durst  ranch,  the  strike  was  momentous  in 
results.  The  trade  unions  themselves  have  given 
but  perfunctory  notice  to  the  migratory  laborer. 
Though  the  skilled  railway  employees  are  com- 
pletely unionized,  their  interest  has  not  extended 
to  the  railway  construction  workers,  whose  living 
and  working  conditions  are  utterly  deplorable. 
California,  an  investigation  showed,  has  between 
4500  and  5000  active  members  of  the  I.  W.  W. 


THE   CASUAL  LABORER  87 

Up  to  the  Wheatland  affair  their  energy  in  the 
west  had  gone  into  free  speech  fights,  notably  at 
Fresno  and  San  Diego.  Since  Wheatland  they 
have  devoted  themselves  entirely  to  organizing 
the  migratory  laborer.  The  destructive  efficiency 
of  the  I.  W.  W.  strike  tactics,  that  of  "direct  ac- 
tion" and  sabotage,  was  shown  in  the  organized 
hop  strike  of  1914,  though  the  strike  failed.  Even 
in  the  spring  of  1915  barn  and  kiln  burnings  oc- 
cured  in  the  hop  fields  up  and  down  the  state,  — 
a  back  fire  of  the  riots  of  1913.  It  is  not  difficult 
to  understand  the  light  allegiance  to  law  and 
order,  to  the  sanctity  of  property,  which  is  an  out- 
standing characteristic  of  this  group.  Much  of 
their  so-called  syndicalistic  philosophy  analyzes 
down  to  a  motive  of  resentment.  Investigators 
report  that  sabotage  and  "putting  the  machine 
out  of  business"  are  the  topics  to  which  the  road 
meetings  turn.  The  group  in  all  its  character- 
istics is  the  poorest  of  raw  material  for  labor  or- 
ganization. Shifting,  without  legal  residence, 
under-nourished  as  a  universal  rule,  incapable  of 
sustained  interest,  with  no  reserve  of  money  or 
energy  to  carry  out  a  propaganda,  they  cannot 
put  forth  the  very  considerable  energy  which  co- 
operation demands.    Their  numerous  strikes  in 


88  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

California  have  been  but  flashes  of  resentment, 
and  when  their  leaders  in  1914  planned  a  great 
picketing  of  all  the  hop  fields  of  the  Sacramento 
valley,  they  found  that  their  pickets  after  a  week 
of  patience  began  to  slip  onto  freight  trains  and 
disappear  to  the  south.  The  needed  two  thousand 
dwindled  to  a  handful  and  the  "great  strike" 
flickered  out.  Hopes  are  high  for  the  1915  season ; 
agitation  is  rife,  and  numerous  fires  to  date  give 
evidence  of  "direct  action"  already  carried  out  on 
the  part  of  the  I.  W.  W.  It  remains  to  be  seen 
how  far  the  1915  tactics  of  the  organization  will 
embarrass  the  agricultural  employers  of  Cali- 
fornia, but  the  word  has  gone  out  that  "no  crop 
is  to  be  harvested"  until  the  indicted  hop  pickers, 
referred  to  in  connection  with  the  Wheatland  af- 
fair, are  freed. 

As  a  class,  the  migratory  laborers  are  nothing 
more  nor  less  than  the  finished  products  of  their 
environment.  They  should  therefore  never  be 
studied  as  isolated  revolutionaries,  but  rather  as, 
on  the  whole,  tragic  symptoms  of  a  sick  social 
order.  Fortunately  the  psychologists  have  made 
it  unnecessary  to  explain  that  there  is  nothing 
willful  or  personally  reprehensible  in  the  vagrancy 
of  these  vagrants.    Their  histories  show   that, 


THE   CASUAL  LABORER  89 

starting  with  the  long  hours  and  dreary  winters  of 
farms  they  ran  away  from,  through  their  char- 
acter-debasing experience  with  irregular  indus- 
trial labor,  on  to  the  vicious  economic  life  of  the 
winter  unemployed,  their  training  predetermined 
but  one  outcome.  As  the  Harvard  biologist  words 
it,  nurture  has  triumphed  over  nature,  the  en- 
vironment has  produced  its  type.  Difficult  though 
organization  of  these  people  may  be,  a  coincidenee 
of  favoring  conditions  may  place  an  opportunity 
in  the  hands  of  a  super  leader.  If  this  comes,  one 
can  be  sure  that  California  would  be  both  very 
astonished  and  very  misused. 


Ill 

THE  I.  W.  W. 


Any  economic  problem  arising  in  the  United 
States  today  is  seen  in  a  vivid  setting  of  war  ex- 
pediency. The  particular  national  danger  to 
which  the  population  is  becoming  increasingly 
sensitive  colors  every  issue,  social,  economic,  or 
moral,  and  the  old  logical  approaches  to  them  are 
rapidly  going  into  the  discard.  Today  prostitu- 
tion, drink,  and  the  free  and  easy  American  con- 
sumption of  food  and  goods  have  been  assailed 
with  a  vehemence  and  impatience  astounding 
when  compared  with  the  gentle  analyses  in  vogue 
a  few  years  ago.  This  tendency  gives  the  consid- 
eration of  such  a  phenomena  as  the  I.  W.  W.  a 
dual  nature,  —  first,  the  now  dominant  one  of  the 
I.  W.  W.  in  relation  to  the  war  psychology  of 
America;  and  second,  the  I.  W.  W.  in  relation  to 
the  stable  sweep  and  evolution  of  American  in- 
dustrialism. The  intensity  of  the  war  temper 
which  plays  about  the  I.  W.  W.  makes  it  very 

91 


92  THE  CASUAL  LABORER 

difficult  to  advance  an  analysis  of  a  scientific  na- 
ture touching  even  this  latter  relationship.  Ex- 
cept in  the  form  of  complete  and  unconditioned 
denunciation,  interest  in  this  American  manifes- 
tation of  syndicalism  is  taboo.  The  Federal  Gov- 
ernment has  within  very  recent  weeks  judged  the 
I.  W.  W.  as  a  menace  to  America's  preparedness 
in  war,  and  the  union's  leaders  are  either  in  prison 
or  jeopardy.  This  positive  action  by  the  Depart- 
ment of  Justice  has  so  emphasized  the  relation  of 
this  union  to  the  worries  and  expediencies  of  our 
war  state  that  the  I.  W.  W.  as  an  economic  prob- 
lem has  practically  disappeared.  But  since  the 
war-time  behavior  of  the  I.  W.  W.  finds  its  only 
psychological  explanation  in  its  economic  en- 
vironment and  experiences,  the  latter  and  tabood 
relationship  must  be  the  major  concern  of  this 
article. 

Another  unappreciated  consideration  might  be 
noted  in  passing.  The  domination  of  the  Ameri- 
can press  over  the  form  and  method  of  publicity 
has  given  Americans  a  deep-seated  bias  in  favor 
of  a  vivid  and  dramatic  presentation  of  all  prob- 
lems, economic  or  moral.  The  rather  gray  and 
sodden  explanation  of  any  labor  revolt  by  refer- 
ence to  the  commonplace  and  miserable  experi- 


THE  I.  W.  W.  93 

ences  of  the  labor  group  would  lack  this  demanded 
vividness.  Just  as  the  French  enjoyed  the  mean 
stories  of  the  debased  life  of  the  petty  thief  when 
framed  up  and  titled  "A  Picture  of  the  Parisian 
Apache,"  so  the  casual  American  demands  white 
hoods  and  mystery  for  the  Kentucky  night  riders 
and  a  dread,  sabotage-using  underground  appari- 
tion for  the  I.  W.  W.  Some  important  portion  of 
I.  W.  W.  terrorism  can  be  traced  directly  back  to 
the  inarticulated  public  demand  that  the  I.  W.  W. 
news  story  produce  a  thrill. 

The  futility  of  much  conventional  American 
social  analyzing  is  due  to  its  description  of  the 
problem  in  terms  of  its  relationship  to  some  rela- 
tively unimportant  or  artificial  institution.  Little 
of  the  current  analyses  of  strikes  or  labor  violence 
uses  the  basic  standards  of  human  desire  and  in- 
tention which  control  these  phenomena.  A  strike 
and  its  demands  are  usually  praised  as  being  law- 
abiding,  or  economically  bearable,  or  are  con- 
demned as  being  unlawful,  or  confiscatory.  These 
four  attributes  of  a  strike  are  important  only  as 
incidental  consequences.  The  habit  of  Americans 
thus  to  measure  up  social  problems  to  the  current, 
temporary,  and  more  or  less  accidental  scheme  of 
traditions  and  legal  institutions,  long  ago  gave 


94  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

birth  to  our  national  belief  that  passing  a  new  law 
or  forcing  obedience  to  an  old  one  was  a  satisfy- 
ing cure  for  any  unrest.  The  current  analysis  of 
the  I.  W.  W.  and  its  activities  is  an  example  of 
this  perverted  and  unscientific  method.  The  I. 
W.  W.  analysis  which  has  given  both  satisfaction 
and  a  basis  for  treating  the  organization  runs  as 
follows:  The  organization  is  unlawful  in  its  ac- 
tivity, un-American  in  its  sabotage,  unpatriotic 
in  its  relation  to  the  flag,  the  government,  and  the 
war.  The  rest  of  the  condemnation  is  a  play  upon 
these  three  attributes.  So  proper  and  so  sufficient 
has  this  condemnation  analysis  become  that  it  is 
taboo  to  reapproach  the  problem.  But  now  our 
internal  affairs  are  so  obviously  out  of  gear  that 
any  comprehensive  scheme  of  national  prepared- 
ness would  demand  full  and  honest  consideration 
be  given  to  all  forces  that  determine  the  degree  of 
American  unity,  one  force  being  this  tabooed  or- 
ganization. 

It  would  be  best  here  to  announce  a  more  or 
less  dogmatic  hypothesis  to  which  the  writer  will 
steadfastly  adhere  and  which  is:  human  behavior 
is  the  rather  simple,  arithmetic  combination  of 
the  inherited  nature  of  man  and  the  environment 
in  which  his  maturing  years  fall.    Man  will  be- 


THE  I.  W.  W.  95 

have  according  to  the  hints  for  conduct  which  the 
accidents  of  his  life  have  stamped  into  his  memory 
mechanism.  A  slum  produces  a  mind  which  has 
only  slum  incidents  with  which  to  work,  and  a 
spoiled  and  protected  child  never  rises  to  ag- 
gressive competitive  behavior,  simply  because  its 
past  life  has  stored  up  no  memory  imprints  from 
which  a  predisposition  to  vigorous  life  can  be 
built.  The  particular  things  called  the  moral  at- 
tributes of  man's  conduct  are  conventionally 
found  by  contrasting  this  educated  and  trained 
way  of  acting  with  the  exigencies  and  social  needs 
or  dangers  of  the  time.  Hence,  while  his  immoral 
or  unpatriotic  behavior  may  fully  justify  his  gov- 
ernment, standing  in  some  particular  danger 
which  his  conduct  intensifies,  in  imprisoning  or 
abolishing  him,  this  punishment  in  no  way  either 
explains  his  character  or  points  to  an  enduring 
solution  of  his  problem.  Suppression,  while  very 
often  justified  and  necessary  in  the  flux  of  human 
relationship,  always  carries  a  social  cost  which 
must  be  liquidated  and  also  a  back-fire  danger 
which  must  be  insured  against.  The  human  being 
is  born  with  no  innate  proclivity  to  crime  or 
special  kind  of  un-patriotism.  Crime  and  treason 
are  habit  activities  educated  into  man  by  environ- 


96  THE  CASUAL  LABORER 

mental  influences  favorable  to  their  development. 
There  is  one  current  objection  to  the  above  reason- 
ing, and  that  is  the  opportunist  one  that  this 
psychological  explanation  softens  society's  criti- 
cism of  the  act,  say  in  this  case  sedition,  and 
makes  difficult  its  suppression.  This  may  in  fact 
take  place,  but  since  it  is  a  result  of  the  transitory 
state  of  affairs  itself,  it  does  not  then  justify  the 
abolition  of  proven  and  scientific  methods  of 
analysis.  Also,  since  any  preparedness  which  can 
be  reUed  upon  in  the  coming  dangerous  years  of 
our  war  participation  must  be  based  on  fact  cal- 
culation and  not  the  loose  and  pseudo-hysterical 
emotions  of  desire,  there  is  more  need  of  proven 
scientific  methods  of  social  analysis  than  America 
has  yet  felt.  The  modern  psychological  study  of 
behavior  makes  it  impossible  to  view  an  I.  W.  W. 
as  a  mobile  and  independent  agent,  exercising  free 
will  and  moral  discretion.  The  I.  W.  W.  is  the 
result  of  a  social  admixture;  he  is  a  more  or  less 
finished  product  and  any  explanatory  analysis 
should  deal  and  deal  alone  with  the  antecedent 
experiences  which  produce  in  a  most  natural  and 
every-day  manner  those  practiced  habits  which 
we  describe  as  "being  an  I.  W.  W."  Syndicalism 
is  then  Hke  patriotism  or  pacificism,  a  condition 
of  mind. 


THE  I.  W.  W.  97 

There  have  been  recently  in  the  state  of  Wash- 
ington mass  meetings,  private  and  public,  devoted 
to  the  problem  of  the  I.  W.  W.  In  one  informal 
meeting  a  lumber  mill  operator  of  long  experience 
advanced  a  policy  of  suppression,  physical  vio- 
lence, and  vigilante  activity.  A  second  operator, 
listening,  observed,  "If  you  lost  your  money,  you 
would  be  the  best  I.  W.  W.  in  the  state."  It  was 
this  identity  of  mind  which  struck  the  second 
operator.  It  is  accurate  and  also  obvious  to  say 
that  the  upper  reaches  of  business  and  society 
possess  its  I.  W.  W.  The  state  of  mind  charac- 
terised by  ruthlessness,  high  egotism,  ignoring  of 
the  needs  and  helplessness  of  much  of  society, 
breaks  out  at  different  social  levels  under  different 
names,  but  the  human  elements  and  even  much 
of  the  vocabulary  remains  the  same. 

It  must  be  reiterated  that  any  attempt  to  use, 
at  this  particular  day  in  our  history,  modern  be- 
havioristic  psychology  in  an  analytic  way  is  not 
only  under  taboo  but  has  resulted  in  an  immediate 
persecution  of  the  scientist  who  so  offends.  A 
certain  editor  in  Yakima,  in  the  State  of  Wash- 
ington, has  been  known  beyond  his  state  limits 
for  his  strong  and  individual  editorial  policy.  His 
editorials  are  more  widely  quoted  than  those  of 


98  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

any  paper  in  the  state.  This  editor  inadvertently 
put  the  I.  W.  W.  horror  to  the  practical  test  by 
interviewing  some  fifty  I.  W.  W.'s  interned  in  a 
Yakima  jail.  These  individuals  had  held  the 
Yakima  Valley  in  terror  and  local  feeling  made 
lynching  and  the  most  extreme  of  violence  not 
only  possible,  but  incidents  of  the  most  reasonable 
expectancy.  The  editor  observed  in  an  editorial 
the  following  day,  that  the  I.  W.  W.  were  much 
like  the  agricultural  workers  he  had  known  all 
his  life.  Their  desires  were  similar,  and  the  de- 
tails of  their  complaints  touching  the  life  they  led 
were  worthy  of  sympathetic  investigation.  They 
were  not  even,  he  thought,  incorrigibly  unpa- 
triotic. He  thought  that  he  could  even  trust  some 
of  them.  These  observations  almost  resulted  in 
an  immediate  ostracising  of  the  editor.  His 
method  of  analysis  had  been  a  very  fair,  if  rough 
and  ready,  approximation  of  that  used  by  modern 
dynamic  psychology. 

The  interesting  contradiction  that  these  modern 
replicas  of  ancient  intolerance  and  persecution 
will  be  carried  through  by  a  people  sincerely  ready 
to  sacrifice  kin  and  wealth  in  the  cause  of  liberty, 
becomes  no  difficult  problem  to  analyse  and  ex- 
plain.   Little  has  been  written  or  made  current 


THE  I.  W.  W.  99 

to  show  how  open  to  phobia  and  mob  suggestion 
a  nation  is  which,  accustomed  and  set  in  the 
habits  of  peace  and  all-occupying  business  ends, 
has  the  props  of  this  life  suddenly  cut  out  from 
under  it.  In  a  daze  America  has  seen  conscrip- 
tion come,  prices  fixed,  industrial  plants  com- 
mandeered, freedom  of  speech  modified.  This  is 
not  an  overturning  of  merely  an  unimportant 
feature  of  American  life,  it  is  the  negation  of 
nearly  the  entire  Kultur  of  the  nation.  The  habit 
and  order  of  every-day  thinking  is  made  ineffi- 
cient and  inapplicable.  While  outwardly  "busi- 
ness as  usual"  seems  to  an  extent  enforced,  in- 
wardly and  in  the  hitherto  secure  mental  back- 
ground is  chaos  and  the  potentiality  for  almost 
any  kind  of  irresponsible  reasoning.  Even  in  the 
rather  secure  social  retreats  of  small  town  life 
take  place,  for  instance,  bursts  of  spy  hunting,  so 
cruel  and  in  such  variance  with  all  the  ideas  of 
fairness  and  control  which  had  been  long  accepted 
as  American  virtues,  that  one  sees  how  adrift  and 
helpless  the  psychological  ship  can  become.  Jo- 
siah  Royce  has  said  that  America's  nation-danger 
was  her  openness  to  mob  suggestion.  Her  century 
of  service  as  an  immigrant  melting  pot  carried  its 
costs,  and  it  was  beyond  reason  to  expect  to  see 


100  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

rise,  from  a  scramble  of  transplanted  nationalities, 
who  had  broken  with  their  traditional  religions, 
their  rules  of  dress,  morality,  and  political  life,  a 
nation  which,  in  Ross'  words,  possesses  a  sturdy 
prophylactic  against  the  hysteria  of  mob  move- 
ment. The  I.  W.  W.  can  be  profitably  viewed 
only  as  a  psychological  by-product  of  the  neg- 
lected childhood  of  industrial  America.  It  is  dis- 
couraging to  see  the  problem  today  almost 
exclusively  examined  regarding  its  relation  to 
patriotism  and  conventional  commercial  morality. 
The  heart  of  the  current  condemnation  of  the 
I.  W.  W.  is  that  it  is  a  viciously  unpatriotic  or- 
ganization. The  writer  of  this  article  made  a 
special  investigation  upon  the  above  issue  among 
the  I.  W.  W.  leaders.  He  pointed  out  that  our 
nation  was  fighting  a  nation  which  suppressed 
free  speech,  not  only  opposed  a  free  individuahsm, 
but  moulded  a  citizen's  mind  to  suit  the  particular 
and  competitive  needs  of  the  state,  and  if  it  sub- 
jected us,  would  bloodily  suppress  just  such  dis- 
quieting agencies  as  the  I.  W.  W.  Methods  of 
discipline  would  be  turned  back  a  hundred  years 
to  the  ancient  system  of  gaining  citizenship  unity 
through  fear,  and  these  policies  would  be  enforced 
by  a  harsh  military  organization,  flushed  and  con- 


THE  I.  W.  W.  101 

fident  from  its  victory.  This  presentation  was  in- 
variably met  by  the  I.  W.  W.  leaders  with  a  recital 
that  for  them  there  was  only  one  war,  and  that 
the  class  war  between  the  "master  class"  and  the 
"slaves."  It  was,  they  argued,  purely  incidental 
whether  a  German  or  an  American  ruled  the  po- 
litical machinery.  It  made  even  less  difference 
whether  the  industrial  master  were  a  German  or 
American.  The  class  war  was  without  national 
lines. 

In  answer  to  the  argument  that  a  bad  political 
system  might  postpone  in  an  important  way  the 
evolution  they  desired  in  class  conflict,  the  leaders 
decried  the  importance  of  war  and  its  political 
results.  They  quoted  with  astonishing  facility 
the  rises  in  the  cost  of  meats,  textiles,  shoes,  and 
so  on.  Their  figures  proved  to  be  accurate.  They 
had  circulated  through  their  lectures  the  fact  that 
steel  plates  had  risen  from  $26.50  a  ton  in 
1913  to  $200  in  1917,  and  the  story  of  the  increase 
in  the  surplus  earnings  of  United  States  Steel, 
Bethlehem  Steel  and  the  powder  companies. 
This  they  joined  to  a  dissertation  on  the  increase 
of  farm  tenancy.  Presumably  they  were  better 
acquainted  with  American  social  statistics  than 
the  academic  class  in  which  the  writer  lives.     It 


102  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

is  perhaps  of  value  to  quote  the  language  of  the 
most  influential  of  the  I.  W.  W.  leaders. 

"You  ask  me  why  the  I.  W.  W.  is  not  patriotic 
to  the  United  States.  If  you  were  a  bum  with- 
out a  blanket;  if  you  had  left  your  wife  and  kids 
when  you  went  west  for  a  job,  and  had  never  lo- 
cated them  since ;  if  your  job  had  never  kept  you 
long  enough  in  a  place  to  qualify  you  to  vote;  if 
you  slept  in  a  lousy,  sour  bunkhouse,  and  ate  food 
just  as  rotten  as  they  could  give  you  and  get  by 
with  it ;  if  deputy  sheriffs  shot  your  cooking  cans 
full  of  holes  and  spilled  your  grub  on  the  ground; 
if  your  wages  were  lowered  on  you  when  the  bosses 
thought  they  had  you  down ;  if  there  was  one  law 
for  Ford,  Suhr  and  Mooney,  and  another  for 
Harry  Thaw;  if  every  person  who  represented 
law  and  order  and  the  nation  beat  you  up,  rail- 
roaded you  to  jail,  and  the  good  Christian  people 
cheered  and  told  them  to  go  to  it,  how  in  hell  do 
you  expect  a  man  to  be  patriotic?  This  war  is  a 
business  man's  war  and  we  don't  see  why  we 
should  go  out  and  get  shot  in  order  to  save  the 
lovely  state  of  affairs  which  we  now  enjoy." 

The  argument  was  rather  difficult  to  keep  pro- 
ductive because  that  rather  material  prerequisite 
to  patriotism,  i.e.  gratitude,  seemed  wanting  in 


THE  I.  W.  W.  103 

their  attitude  towards  the  American  government. 
Their  state  of  mind  could  only  be  explained  by  re- 
ferring it,  as  was  earlier  suggested,  to  its  major 
relationships.  The  dominating  concern  of  the 
I.  W.  W.  is  what  Keller  calls  the  maintenance 
problem.  Their  philosophy  is,  in  its  simple  reduc- 
tion, a  stomach  philosophy,  and  their  political- 
industrial  revolt  could  be  called  without  injustice 
a  hunger  riot.  But  there  is  an  important  correc- 
tion to  this  simple  statement.  While  their  way  of 
living  has  seriously  encroached  on  the  urgent  min- 
imums  of  nutrition,  shelter,  clothing  and  physical 
health,  it  has  also  long  outraged  the  American 
labor  class  traditions  touching  social  life,  sex  life, 
self  dignity,  and  ostentation.  Had  the  food  and 
shelter  been  sufficient,  the  revolt  tendencies  might 
have  simmered  out,  were  the  migratory  labor  pop- 
ulation not  keenly  sensitive  to  traditions  of  a 
richer  psychological  life  than  mere  physical  main- 
tenance. Considering  their  opportunity,  the  I.  W. 
W.  read  and  discuss  abstractions  to  a  surprising 
extent.  In  their  libraries  the  few  novels  are  white 
paged  while  a  translation  of  Karl  Marx  or  Kaut- 
sky,  or  the  dull  and  theoretical  pamphlets  of  their 
own  leaders,  are  dog-eared.  Few  American  ana- 
lysts have  realized  what  firmly  held  traditions  have 


104  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

been  established  throughout  all  the  working 
classes  by  the  muckracking  literature  of  the  last 
twenty  years.  It  is  rather  a  hair-raising  experi- 
ence for  a  conventional  member  of  the  middle 
class  to  inquire  of  almost  any  labor  group  how 
they  esteem  the  morals  of  the  commercial  middle 
class.  Veblen's  acute  reasoning  touching  the  de- 
cay among  industrial  labor  of  the  prestige  of  law 
and  order,  of  the  conventional  rights  of  property 
and  individual  liberty  seemed  to  find  abundant 
illustration.  A  statement  that  the  present  indus- 
trial order  and  its  control  promises  a  reasonable 
progress  and  happiness  (and  that  the  middle  class 
are  forced  to  claim)  is  not  only  received  as  a  hu- 
morous observation  by  the  I.  W.  W.  but  today  by 
American  Trade  Unionism  as  well. 

There  will  be  as  many  degrees  and  shades  of 
patriotism  as  there  are  social  classes  in  our  so- 
ciety. The  patriotism  which  placed  fifty  thou- 
sand volunteers  on  the  rolls  of  the  Officers'  Re- 
serve Corps  is  not  an  inborn  sentiment  or  any- 
thing which  arbitrarily  came  with  habitation  on 
American  soil.  It  was  an  acquired  habit  of  mind 
and  reflected  a  rich  background  of  social  satisfac- 
tions, which  in  the  mind  of  a  young  officer  had 
sprung  from  his  country,  America.    Not  only  the 


THE  I.  W.  W.  105 

self-sacrificing  quality  of  this  patriotism,  but  the 
very  patriotism  itself,  depends  on  the  existence  of 
these  social  satisfactions.  Cynical  disloyalty  and 
contempt  of  the  flag  must  in  the  light  of  modern 
psychology  come  from  a  mind  which  is  devoid  of 
national  gratitude  and  for  whom  the  United 
States  stirs  no  memory  of  satisfaction  or  happi- 
ness. To  those  of  us  who  normally  feel  loyal  to  the 
nation,  such  a  disloyal  sentiment  brings  sharp  in- 
dignation. As  an  index  of  our  own  sentiment  and 
our  own  happy  relations  to  the  nation,  this  indig- 
nation has  value.  As  a  stimulus  to  a  program  or 
ethical  generalization,  it  is  the  cause  of  vast  in- 
accuracy and  sad  injustice.  American  syndicalism 
is  not  a  scheming  group  dominated  by  an  uncon- 
ventional and  destructive  social  philosophy.  It  is 
merely  a  commonplace  state  of  mind.  Not  such 
a  mind  state  as  Machiavelli  or  Robespierre  pos- 
sessed, but  a  mind  stamped  by  the  lowest,  most 
miserable  labor  conditions  and  outlook  which 
American  industrialism  produces.  To  those  who 
have  seen  first  hand  the  life  of  the  Western  casual 
laborer,  any  reflections  on  his  gratitude  or  spiri- 
tual buoyancy  seem  ironical  humor. 

An    altogether   unwarranted    importance    has 
been  given  to  the  syndicalistic  philosopliy  of  the 


106  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

I.  W.  W.  A  few  leaders  use  its  phraseology.  Of 
these  few,  not  half  a  dozen  know  the  meaning  of 
French  syndicalism  or  English  guild  socialism.  To 
the  great  wandering  rank  and  file,  the  I.  W.  W.  is 
simply  the  only  social  break  in  the  harsh  search 
for  work  they  have  ever  had,  its  headquarters  the 
only  competitor  of  the  saloon  in  which  they  are 
welcome.  They  listen  stolidly  to  their  frequent 
lecturers  with  an  obvious  and  sustained  interest. 
The  lecturer's  analysis  and  dissection  of  the  in- 
dustrial structures  is  often  as  abstract  as  an  eco- 
nomic professor's  dissertation  on  Value.  The  ap- 
plause comes  when  the  point  is  illustrated  by  some 
familiar  and  vigorous  action  through  which  the 
boss  is  humiliated  graphically,  told  in  phrases 
taken  from  camp  speech.  The  command  of  their 
alleged  philosophy  is  exactly  equal  to  the  capacity 
of  a  Pittsburgh  Republican's  to  discuss  the  sig- 
nificance of  Schedule  K,  but  the  concrete  details  of 
industrial  renovation  find  eager  interest.  The 
American  I.  W.  W.  is  a  neglected  and  lonely  hobo 
worker,  usually  malnourished  and  in  need  of 
medical  care.  He  is  as  far  from  a  scheming  syn- 
dicalist, after  the  French  model,  as  the  imagina- 
tion could  conceive.  His  proven  sabotage  activi- 
ties in  the  West  total  up  a  few  hop  kiln  burnings. 


THE  I.  W.  W.  107 

Compared  to  the  widespread  sabotage  in  prison 
industries,  where  a  startlingly  large  per  cent  of  ma- 
terials are  intentionally  ruined,  the  I.  W.  W.  per- 
formance is  not  worth  mentioning.  It  is  to  these 
less  romantic  economic  phases  that  we  must  turn 
for  the  problem's  true  cost. 

The  characteristic  of  the  I.  W.  W.  movement 
most  worthy  of  serious  consideration  is  the  decay 
of  ideals  of  thrift  and  industry.  To  this  can  be 
added,  in  place  of  the  old-time  traditional  loyalty 
to  the  employer,  a  sustained  antagonism  to  him. 
The  casual  laborer  of  the  West  drifts  off  the  job 
without  reflection  as  to  the  effect  of  this  on  the 
welfare  of  the  employer,  feels  little  interest  in  the 
quality  of  workmanship,  and  is  ever  not  only  a 
potential  striker,  but  ready  to  take  up  political  or 
legal  war  against  the  employing  class.  This  sullen 
hostility  has  been  steadily  growing  in  the  last 
ten  years.  It  is  not  as  melodramatic  as  sabotage, 
but  vastly  more  important.  To  the  student  it  is 
of  major  importance  because  it  can  be  linked  up 
more  directly  and  with  more  accuracy  to  its  psy- 
chological causes.  To  be  short,  it  is  a  natural 
psychic  outcome  of  a  distressing  and  anti-social 
labor  condition.  This  sullen  hostility  develops 
very  naturally  the  surface  manifestations  of  un- 


108  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

patriotism,  anti-religion,  and  unlawful  action,  but 
the  more  important  characteristic  is  the  deeper 
economic  one  of  the  growing  unreliability  and 
decay  of  the  workmanlike  spirit  among  the  mi- 
gratory laborers. 

To  revert  for  a  moment  to  the  economic  view 
point.  The  I.  W.  W.  movement  with  complete 
accuracy  can  be  described  as  the  extension  of  the 
American  labor  strike  into  the  zone  of  casual,  mi- 
gratory labor.  All  the  superficial  features,  such  as 
its  syndicalistic  philosophy,  its  sabotage,  threats 
of  burning  and  destruction,  are  the  natural  and 
normal  accompaniments  of  an  organized  labor  dis- 
turbance in  this  field.  The  American  strike  in 
contrast  with  the  English  and  German  has 
evolved,  for  certain  psychological  reasons,  into  a 
militant  and  violent  affair.  To  the  American  em- 
ployer the  breaking  of  a  strike  satisfies  a  curious 
medley  of  desires.  It  appeals  to  his  strong  and 
primitive  sporting  instinct,  it  is  demanded  by  his 
highly  cultured  American  individualism,  and  it 
satisfies  what  of  legal  rights  he  has  imbibed  from 
the  loose  traditions  of  laissez  jaire.  Taking  all 
the  environmental  influences  which  focus  on  in- 
dustrial management  and  property  ownership  in 
this  country,  strike  breaking  is  a  very  normal 


THE  I.  W.  W.  109 

managerial  activity.  Like  Calhoun  in  San  Fran- 
cisco, the  American  manager  has  been  willing  to 
stake  his  entire  fortune  on  an  anti-union  venture, 
which  from  no  standpoint  promised  profits  or 
peace.  Nowhere  else  in  the  world  exists  the 
unique  American  custom  of  importing  strike 
breakers.  The  nation-wide  anti-union  program  of 
the  National  Manufacturers'  Association  is  even 
as  uniquely  American.  And  these  highly  individ- 
ualistic industrial  habits  are  practiced  upon  a 
labor  class  which  is  in  a  most  peculiar  way  un- 
fashioned  to  acquiesce  peacefully. 

For  those  who  care  to  see,  there  is  abundant 
evidence  that  the  Trade  Union  movement  in  the 
United  States  has  become  revolutionary.  The 
much  advertised  split  between  the  American  Fed- 
eration of  Labor  and  the  I.  W.  W.  is  bridged  over 
with  suggestive  ease  when  the  prosecution  of  an 
I.  W.  W.  case  suggests  the  class  struggle.  This 
temper  has  not  prevented  the  leaders  of  the 
American  Federation  from  giving  a  traditional 
American  patriotism  to  the  present  war.  But  no 
publicist  of  note  has  dared  to  analyze  the  spread 
of  embarrassing  strikes  throughout  the  United 
States  during  the  past  two  months,  the  most 
critical  months  of  our  war  activities.  A  reasonable 


110  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

induction  from  the  industrial  facts  would  be 
that  the  American  labor  class  is  not  par- 
ticipating in  the  kind  of  patriotic  fervor  that 
is  in  vogue  among  the  upper  middle  class.  It  is 
not  sufficient  to  say  that  their  wage  demands  oc- 
cupy their  attention.  Plus  this  ancient  interest 
is  a  set  of  traditional  and  complicating  forces 
which  condition  labor's  war  attitude.  The  re- 
cital of  the  war  profits  in  steel,  in  copper,  in  foods, 
in  medicines,  does  not  fall  on  ordinary  mind  re- 
ceptors. It  falls  on  a  labor  class  mind  with  a 
long  cultured  background  of  suspicion. 

As  has  already  been  said,  the  most  vivid  chap- 
ter in  American  periodical  literature  was  the 
period  of  magazine  muckraking.  A  new  and  re- 
markably effective  school  of  pamphleteers  arose 
and  operated  in  a  psychologically  ripe  situation. 
Their  audience  had  been  played  on  from  the  early 
days  of  the  granger  movement  and  was  tuned  to 
absorb  as  truth  the  bizarre  expose  of  industri- 
alism. While  the  magazines  a  few  years  ago 
dropped  the  propaganda.  Federal  commissions  and 
state  investigations  continued  and  gave  dignity 
and  substance  to  the  earlier  and  more  tempera- 
mental denunciation.  Few  members  of  the  middle 
class  know  how  revolutionary  is  the  material  to 


THE  I.  W.  W.  Ill 

be  found  in  the  Federal  Immigration  Com- 
mission's report,  the  Federal  report  on  Woman 
and  Child  Wage  Earners,  the  Massachusetts 
Minimum  Wage  Commission's  report,  or  even  the 
volumes  on  Occupations  of  the  United  States 
Census.  For  instance  this  latter  sober  source  sol- 
emnly announces  on  page  seventy-one  of  its  vol- 
ume on  Occupational  Statistics  that  609,000  of 
the  small  boys  of  the  United  States  between  the 
ages  of  ten  and  thirteen  are  to  be  accurately  cata- 
loged as  "workers  gainfully  employed."  The  la- 
bor class  in  the  United  States  reads  much  more 
on  economic  matters  than  the  middle  class  and  is 
more  accustomed  to  meetings  and  debate  in  which 
the  material  of  the  reading  is  used.  The  middle 
class  is  strangely  innocent  of  the  publicity  deal- 
ing with  its  own  activities.  Those  who  teach  col- 
lege economics  to  the  sons  and  daughters  of  the 
middle  class  are  constantly  amazed  at  the  con- 
trast between  them  and  the  few  labor  class  chil- 
dren who  reach  the  university. 

It  is  not  a  far  cry  from  the  American  labor  class 
attitude  toward  the  war  to  any  analysis  of  the 
I.  W.  W.  The  I.  W.  W.  is,  as  has  been  said,  the 
aggressive  American  labor  movement,  emer2;ing- 
at  the  lower  and  less  disciplined  social  level.    The 


112  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

not  surprising  inability  of  the  American  citizen  to 
note  the  growing  class  consciousness  of  the  Trade 
Union  movement  guaranteed  that  neither  would 
he  make  that  reasonable  prophecy  touching  the 
strike  methods  which  would  be  manifest  when 
this  class  struggle  gained  force  and  form  among 
the  migratory  casual  labor  of  the  West.  If  the 
American  Trade  Union  world  is  only  conditionally 
patriotic  in  its  attitude  toward  the  war,  the  I.  W. 
W.  is  violently  negative  for  the  same,  if  more 
deeply  held,  reasons.  Casualties  and  deaths  in 
the  trenches  with  its  all-diverting  suffering  at 
home  will  reinforce  patriotism  and  silence  for  a 
time  the  class  demands  and  cries,  but  the  in- 
gredients of  the  social  mixture  will  not  be  changed 
in  any  important  degree.  War  to  the  American 
labor  world  is  an  episode,  and  for  them  the  making 
of  a  living  which  dominated  their  thoughts  before 
the  war  runs  on  through  the  war  period  itself.  So 
patriotism,  in  this  logic,  rests  upon  the  degree  of 
satisfaction  and  content  with  which  labor  views 
its  lot.  The  labor  mind  in  America  is  in  profound 
unrest,  and  it  is  imperative  that  those  Americans 
on  whom  falls  the  duty  a^  thinking  and  planning 
accept  such  facts  as  all-determining  and  do  not 
misuse  the  moment  by  useless  if  admirable  moral 
indignation. 


THE  I.  W.  W.  113 

II 

The  I.  W.  W.  is  a  union  of  unskilled  workers  in 
large  part  employed  in  agriculture  and  in  the  pro- 
duction of  raw  materials.  While  the  I.  W.  W. 
appeared  in  the  East  at  Lawrence,  Patterson,  and 
certain  other  places,  at  the  height  of  strike  activ- 
ity, its  normal  habitat  is  in  the  upper  middle  West 
and  the  far  West  from  British  Columbia  down 
into  Old  Mexico.  But  within  the  past  year,  apart 
from  the  Dakota  wheat  fields  and  iron  ranges  of 
Minnesota  and  Michigan,  the  zone  of  important 
activity  has  been  Arizona,  California,  Washington, 
Idaho,  and  Colorado.  The  present  wartime  I.  W. 
W.  problem  is  that  of  its  activity  in  the  far  West. 
It  is  fortunate  for  analysis  that  the  I.  W.  W.  mem- 
bership in  the  West  is  consistently  of  one  type, 
and  one  which  has  had  a  uniform  economic  ex- 
perience. They  are  migratory  workers  currently 
called  hobo  labor.  The  terms  ''hobo  miner," 
"hobo  lumberjack,"  "the  blanket  stiff"  are  fa- 
miliar and  necessary  in  accurate  description  of 
Western  labor  conditions.  Very  few  of  these  mi- 
gratory workers  have  lived  long  enough  in  any 
one  place  to  establish  legal  residence  and  vote, 
and  they  are  also  womanless.    Only  about  ten  per 


114  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

cent  have  been  married,  and  these  have  either  lost 
their  wives  or  deserted  them.  Many  claim  to  be 
"working  out,"  and  expect  eventually  to  return 
to  their  families.  But  examination  usually  dis- 
closes the  fact  that  they  have  not  sent  money 
home  recently  or  received  letters.  They  are 
"floaters"  in  every  social  sense.  Out  of  thirty 
suicides  in  the  cheap  lodging  houses  in  San  Fran- 
cisco in  the  month  of  December,  1913,  but  two 
left  behind  any  word  as  to  their  homes  or  their 
relatives.  Half  of  the  migratories  are  of  Ameri- 
can birth,  the  other  half  being  largely  made  up  of 
the  newer  immigration  from  Southeastern  Europe. 
The  dues-paying  membership  of  the  I.  W.  W.  is 
an  uncertain  and  volatile  thing.  While  a  careful 
study  in  California  in  1915  showed  but  4,500 
affiliated  members  of  the  I.  W.  W.  in  that  state, 
it  was  very  evident  that  the  functioning  and 
striking  membership  was  double  this  or  more. 
In  the  State  of  Washington,  during  the  lumber 
strike  of  this  year,  the  I.  W.  W.  membership  most 
probably  was  not  over  3,000,  but  the  number  of 
those  active  in  the  strike  and  joining  in  support  of 
the  I.  W.  W,  numbered  approximately  7,000.  A 
careful  estimate  of  the  membership  in  the  United 
States  gives  75,000.    In  the  history  of  American 


THE  I.  W.  W.  115 

labor  there  has  appeared  no  organization  so  sub- 
ject to  fluctuation  in  membership  and  strength. 
Several  times  it  seemed  on  the  point  of  joining  the 
Knights  of  Labor  in  the  graveyard  of  labor  class 
movements,  but  energized  by  some  sudden  strike 
flare  it  appears  again  as  an  active  force.  This 
tenacity  of  Ufe  comes  because  the  I.  W.  W.  is  not 
only  incapable  of  legal  death,  but  has  in  fact  no 
formal  politico-legal  existence.  Its  treasury  is 
merely  the  momentary  accumulation  of  strike 
funds.  Its  numerous  headquarters  are  the  result 
of  the  energy  of  local  secretaries.  They  are  not 
places  for  executive  direction  of  the  union  as  much 
as  gregarious  centers  where  the  lodging  house  in- 
habitant or  the  hobo  with  his  blanket  can  find 
light,  a  stove,  and  companionship.  In  the  pro- 
hibition states  of  the  West,  the  I.  W.  W.  hall  has 
been  the  only  social  substitute  for  the  saloon  to 
these  people.  The  migratory  workers  have  almost 
all  seen  better  economic  and  social  days,  and 
carry  down  into  their  disorganized  labor  level  tra- 
ditions, if  faint  ones,  of  some  degree  of  dignity  and 
intellectual  life.  To  this  group  of  old  time  desires 
the  headquarters  caters.  In  times  of  strike  and 
disorder  the  headquarters  becomes  the  center  of 
the  direct  action  propaganda.    But  when  this  is 


116  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

by,  its  character  changes  to  the  casuals'  rest  house, 
and  as  such  is  unique  in  the  unskilled  workers' 
history. 

It  will  be  of  great  value  to  understand  the 
matter  of  fact  conditions  under  which  the  Ameri- 
can unskilled  worker  lives  and  works  and  is  pre- 
pared for  the  drop  down  into  the  migratory  class. 

In  1910,  of  the  30,091,564  male  persons  in  the 
United  States  listed  as  bread  winners,  10,400,000 
approximately  were  in  that  particular  unskilled 
work  from  which  the  migratory  is  recruited. 
Under  what  conditions  did  this  population  which 
furnished  the  present  migratory  group  work? 
What  was  their  wage,  and  how  long  a  period 
each  year  were  they  employed?  A  typical  Chicago 
slaughter  house  in  1912  paid  82  per  cent  of  the 
employees  less  than  20  cents  an  hour.  This 
company  worked  their  men  on  the  average  of 
37^  hours  in  the  week,  and  this  gave  the  55  per 
cent  of  the  men  who  averaged  17  cents  an  hour, 
an  income  of  $6.37  a  week.  In  the  steel  industry 
the  Government  Report  of  1910  shows  that 
twenty-nine  per  cent  of  the  employees  worked  a 
seven-day  week  and  twenty  per  cent  a  seven-day 
week  with,  a  twelve-hour  day.  Forty-three  per 
cent  worked  a  twelve-hour  day  six  days  a  week. 


THE    I.    W.    W.  117 

This  Federal  study  reports  that  49.69  per  cent 
of  the  employees  received  less  than  18  cents 
an  hour.  This  49.69  per  cent  is  the  group  of 
the  unskilled.  In  the  steel  industry  eight  per  cent 
of  the  workers  earned  less  than  fourteen  cents  per 
hour,  and  twenty  per  cent  under  sixteen  cents. 
The  Federal  Immigration  Commission's  report 
(1910)  announced  that  not  one  of  the  twelve 
basic  American  industries  paid  the  average  head 
of  a  family  within  $100  a  year  of  the  minimum 
for  family  subsistence,  and  two-thirds  of  the 
twelve  industries  paid  the  family  head  less  than 
$550  a  year.  Professor  Frankfurter's  brief  before 
the  Supreme  Court  in  the  minimum  wage  case 
(1916)  alleges  that  half  of  the  wage  earners'  fami- 
lies in  the  United  States  have  an  income  below 
that  needed  for  adequate  subsistence.  To  quote 
the  authoritative  research  of  Warren  and  Syden- 
stricker  of  the  Federal  Public  Health  Service,  ''in 
the  principal  industries,  fully  one-fourth  of  the 
adult  male  workers  who  are  heads  of  families 
earned  less  than  $400,  one-half  earned  less  than 
$600,  four-fifths  earned  less  than  $800,  and  less 
than  one-tenth  earn  as  much  as  $1,000  a  year. 
Approximately  one-fourth  of  the  women  workers 
eighteen  years  of  age  and  over  employed  in  the 


118  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

principal  manufacturing  industries  earned  less 
than  $200  a  year,  and  two-thirds  less  than  $400." 
In  reference  to  the  even  more  vital  statistics  of 
total  family  income  these  two  investigators  say, 
"the  conclusion  is  also  indicated  that  one  in  every 
ten  or  twelve  working  class  families  had  at  the 
time  of  the  investigation  (1912  to  1914)  an  an- 
nual income  of  less  than  $300  a  year ;  that  nearly 
a  third  had  incomes  of  less  than  $500,  and  over 
one-half  of  the  families  had  incomes  of  less  than 
$750  a  year."  The  numerous  cost  of  living  studies 
of  this  period  are  fairly  unanimous  that  $800  is 
absolutely  necessary  for  the  adequate  minimum 
of  subsistence  for  an  American  labor  class  family. 
Professor  Fairchild  of  Yale  said  in  1913  "if  we 
fix  these  standards  of  living  in  mind,  and  then 
look  back  over  the  wage  scales  given  on  the  fore- 
going pages,  we  are  struck  with  the  utter  inade- 
quacy of  the  annual  incomes  of  the  foreign  bom 
to  meet  even  these  minimum  requirements  of 
decency." 

It  is  reasonable  to  argue  that  working  class 
parents  suffer  in  the  conventional  way  in  the 
death  of  their  children.  The  Federal  Children's 
Bureau  reports  "for  all  live  babies  born  in  wed- 
lock the  infant  mortality  rate  is  130  7/10  in  a 


THE    I.    W.    W.  119 

thousand;  it  rises  to  255  7/10  when  the  father 
earns  less  than  $521  a  year  or  less  than  $10  a 
week,  and  falls  to  eighty-four  when  he  earns  $1200 
or  more." 

The  irregularity  of  industrial  employment  is  as 
important  an  element  as  the  height  of  the  wage 
scale.  Dr.  Devine  says  that  unemployment  heads 
the  list  of  the  causes  of  American  destitution.  The 
American  coal  miner  must  expect  unemployment 
one-fourth  to  one- third  of  his  time.  In  1908  the 
unemployment  in  all  trades  was  35.7  per  cent. 
Statistics  pointed  to  nearly  a  twenty  per  cent  loss 
for  all  industrial  workers  in  the  year  through  un- 
employment during  this  period.  The  combina- 
tion of  low  wages,  the  unskilled  nature  of  the 
work  and  its  great  irregularity,  tends  to  break  the 
habit'  and  desire  for  stable  industry  among  the 
workers.  Millions  drift  into  migrating  from  one 
industrial  center  to  another  in  search  of  work.  In 
these  centers  nearly  all  saloon  keepers  run  an  em- 
ployment agency  business  of  a  more  or  less  in- 
formal kind,  and  to  the  saloon  the  job  hunter 
turns.  His  fee  for  the  job  is  to  drink  up  part  of 
his  pay  check  and  invariably  his  history  here  be- 
comes spotted  with  a  recital  of  excuses  sent  to  the 
distant  wife  instead  of  money.    The  worker  slides 


120  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

down  the  scale  and  out  of  his  mdustry  and  joins 
the  millions  of  unskilled  or  lost-skilled  who  float 
back  and  forth  from  Pennsylvania  to  Missouri 
and  from  the  lumber  camps  to  the  Gulf  states  and 
California.  They  lie  up  in  the  winter  in  the  cheap 
lodging  houses,  in  a  state  of  pseudo-hibernation. 
Thirty  dollars  plus  a  few  weeks  of  ice  cutting  will 
weather  the  winter  through.  Some  150,000  are 
in  Chicago,  as  many  in  New  York,  40,000  in  San 
Francisco,  even  250  in  Phoenix,  Arizona.  In  one 
San  Francisco  lodging  house,  out  of  250  beds, 
there  were  eight  with  outside  ventilation.  A 
New  York  study  disclosed  that  the  lodging  house 
inmates  were  eleven  times  more  tubercular  than 
the  average  population.  The  beds  seldom  have 
linen  and  the  covers  are  usually  dirty  quilts 
which  have  to  be  repeatedly  fumigated  during 
the  winter  for  vermin.  The  migratory  lies  up 
for  the  winter  with  a  thirty-dollar  stake,  accord- 
ing to  the  report  of  the  Chicago  Commission 
on  Unemployment.  This  often  will  not  stretch 
over  the  period,  so  recourse  is  had  to  the  street, 
the  saloons,  and  the  city.  In  a  ten-year  period, 
the  Chicago  police  stations  gave  lodging  to 
1,275,463  homeless  men,  and  the  municipal  lodg- 
ing house  to  370,655.  Only  twenty  per  cent  of 
these  were  residents  of  Chicago. 


THE    I.   W.   W.  121 

In  the  spring  this  labor  group  drifts  out 
toward  the  first  work.  In  main,  they  beat  their 
way.  Between  1901  and  1905  23,964  tres- 
passers were  killed  on  American  railroads,  and 
25,236  injured.  These  were  largely  tramps  and 
hoboes.  The  railroad  companies  calculated  that 
there  were  500,000  hoboes  beating  their  way  or 
waiting  at  stations  to  catch  on  a  train,  or  walking 
the  tracks  at  any  one  time.  This  group  might  be 
called  the  fraction  of  the  migratory  millions  actu- 
ally in  transit.  Numerous  statistical  studies  show 
that  the  average  period  on  a  job  of  the  migratory 
is  between  ten  and  fourteen  days.  With  a  stake 
of  $10  he  will  retire  to  a  hobo  camp  beside  some 
stream,  his  "jungle,"  as  the  road  vernacular  has 
it,  and  adding  his  daily  quarter  or  half  a  dollar  to 
the  "mulligan  fund"  will  live  on  until  the  stake 
is  gone.  If  he  tends  to  live  further  on  the  charity 
of  the  new  comers  he  is  styled  a  "jungle  buzzard" 
and  cast  forth.  He  then  resumes  his  haphazard 
job-search,  the  only  economic  plan  in  his  mind  a 
faint  realization  that  about  August  he  must  be- 
gin to  accumulate  his  $30  winter  stake.  Each  year 
finds  him  physically  in  worse  disrepair,  psycho- 
logically more  hopeless,  morally  more  bitter  and 
anti-social.    His  importance  to  any  forecast  of  our 


122  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

nation's  future  lies  in  the  uncomfortable  fact  that 
proportionally  he  is  increasing  in  number  and  his 
recruiting  group  above  is  increasing  in  unrest  and 
economic  instability.  The  menace  of  this  drift 
has  not  escaped  the  critical  authorities.  John  R. 
Commons,  of  Wisconsin,  in  an  analysis  of  the 
labor  unrest  in  America  and  the  danger  of  class 
conflict  said,  "While  immigration  continues  in 
great  volume,  class  lines  will  be  forming  and  re- 
forming, weak  and  unstable.  To  prohibit  or 
greatly  restrict  immigration  would  bring  forth 
class  conflict  within  a  generation."  And  no  less 
a  careful  political  scientist  than  Woodrow  Wilson 
wrote  in  1913:  "Don't  you  know  that  some  man 
with  eloquent  tongue,  without  conscience,  who  did 
not  care  for  the  nation,  could  put  this  whole  coun- 
try into  a  flame?  Don't  you  know  that  this  coun- 
try from  one  end  to  the  other  believes  that  some- 
thing is  wrong?  What  an  opportunity  it  would  be 
for  some  man  without  conscience  to  spring  up  and 
say  'Follow  me ! '  —  and  lead  in  paths  of  destruc- 
tion. .  .  .  We  are  in  a  temper  to  reconstruct  eco- 
nomic society  as  we  were  once  in  a  temper  to 
reconstruct  political  society." 

It   is    a    conventional    economic    truism    that 
American  industrialism  is  guaranteeing  to  some 


THE    I.    W.    W.  123 

half  of  the  forty  millions  of  our  industrial  popu- 
lation a  life  of  such  limited  happiness,  of  such 
restrictions  on  personal  development,  and  of  such 
misery  and  desolation  when  sickness  or  accident 
comes,  that  we  would  be  childish  political  scien- 
tists not  to  see  that  from  such  an  environment 
little  sacrificing  nation-love,  little  of  ethics,  little 
of  gratitude  could  come.  It  is  unfortunate  that 
the  scientific  findings  of  our  social  condition  must 
use  words  which  sound  strangely  like  the  phrase- 
ology of  the  Socialists.  But  that  identity  should 
be  embarrassing  logically  to  the  critics  of  these 
findings,  not  to  the  scientists.  Those  who  have 
investigated  and  studied  in  the  lower  strata  of 
American  labor  have  long  recognized  the  I.  W.  W. 
as  purely  a  symptom  of  a  certain  distressing  state 
of  affairs.  The  casual  migratory  laborers  are  the 
finished  product  of  an  economic  environment 
which  seems  cruelly  efiicient  in  turning  out 
human  beings  modeled  after  all  the  standards 
which  society  abhors.  The  history  of  the  migra- 
tory workers  shows  that  starting  with  the  long 
hours  and  dreary  winters  of  the  farms  they  ran 
away  from,  or  the  sour-smelling  bunk-house  in  a 
coal  village,  through  their  character-dobasinc;  ex- 
perience with  the  drifting  "hire  and  fire"  life  in 


124  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

the  industries,  on  to  the  vicious  social  and  eco- 
nomic life  of  the  winter  unemployed,  their  train- 
ing predetermined  but  one  outcome,  and  the  en- 
vironment produced  its  type.  The  I.  W.  W.  has 
importance  only  as  an  illustration  of  a  stable 
American  economic  process.  Its  pitiful  syndi- 
calism, its  street  corner  opposition  to  the  war,  are 
the  inconsequential  trimmings.  Its  strike  alone, 
faithful  as  it  is  to  the  American  type,  is  an  il- 
luminating thing.  The  I.  W.  W.,  like  the  Grang- 
ers, the  Knights  of  Labor,  the  Farmers'  Alliance, 
the  Progressive  Party,  is  but  a  revolt  phenomena. 
The  cure  lies  in  the  care  taking  of  its  psychic  an- 
tecedents, and  the  stability  of  our  Republic  de- 
pends on  the  degree  of  courage  and  science  with 
which  we  move  to  the  task. 


rv 

.     MOTIVES  IN  ECONOMIC  LIFE 

The  first  quarter  of  this  century  is  breaking  up 
in  a  riot  of  economic  irrationalism.  The  carefully 
selected  efficiency  axioms  of  peaceful  life  are 
tossed  on  the  scrap  heap,  and  all  society  seems  to 
be  seeking  objects  and  experiences  not  found  in 
any  of  our  economists'  careful  descriptions  of  the 
modern  industrial  order.  War  allies  refuse  to 
unify  their  military  policy,  Russia  is  called  on  to 
exhibit  a  sedate  and  stable  economic  life  when 
she  lacks  wholesale  all  the  attributes  to  it.  And 
we  Americans,  despite  the  notorious  record  of 
stringent  social  accounting  imposed  by  the  stand- 
ards of  war  efficiency,  still  lean  with  fine  confi- 
dence upon  the  structure  of  genial  optimism 
which  dominates  so  much  of  our  national  psy- 
chology. We  look  hopefully  to  see  patriotism  flow 
pure  and  strong  from  an  industrial  stratum  whose 
occasional  phenomena  are  Lawrence,  McKces 
Rock,   Paterson,   Colorado   Fuel   and    Iron,    the 

125 


126  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

Durst  hop  ranch  in  California,  Everett  in  Wash- 
ington, Butte  in  Montana,  Bisbe  in  Arizona. 
Though  strikes  have  increased  some  300  per  cent 
over  peace  times,  though  the  American  labor 
world  is  boiling  and  sputtering  disturbances,  be- 
wildering in  their  variety  and  rapidity  of  appear- 
ance, our  cure  is  a  vague  caution  to  "wait  until 
casualties  begin  to  come,"  an  uneasy  contempla- 
tion of  labor  conscription,  or  a  wave  of  suppres- 
sion. 

Though  national  unity,  economic  and  military, 
seems  the  obvious  and  essential  aim  of  the  pa- 
triotic citizen,  much  done  in  the  name  of  unifica- 
tion seems  to  be  curiously  efficient  in  producing 
disunity.  The  following  commonplace  incident 
illustrates  this:  Note  first  that  Seattle  is  in  a 
state  of  extreme  industrial  unrest.  During  a 
single  short  period  this  summer,  that  city  had  a 
two  weeks'  strike  paralysis  of  its  street-car  system, 
a  threatened  walk-out  of  the  gas  workers,  was  the 
strike  center  of  a  complete  tie-up  of  the  lumber 
industry  of  the  state,  experienced  a  building- 
trades  strike  involving  the  entire  city,  had  a  walk- 
out of  30,000  shipbuilders,  an  express  drivers' 
strike,  a  candy  workers'  strike,  a  newsboys'  strike, 
and  enjoyed  the  beginning  of  an  organization  of 


MOTIVES  IN  ECONOMIC  LIFE         127 

domestic  servants.  This  city  so  described  becomes 
the  environment  for  the  following  incident: 

The  I.  W.  W.  is  strong  in  the  Pacific  North- 
west, and  though  it  bitterly  fights  the  American 
Federation  of  Labor,  some  of  the  federation  trade 
unions  found  in  the  rough-handed  trades,  such  as 
lumbering,  stevedoring,  and  even  shipbuilding, 
have  drifted  toward  syndicalism  and  many  of 
their  members  even  carry  secretly  the  red  cards  of 
the  I.  W.  W.  The  federal  government  has  met 
the  anti-war  agitation  of  the  I.  W.  W.  with  fair 
cleverness.  When  arrests  have  been  made,  pub- 
licity has  been  given  to  the  alleged  treasonable 
activity  of  the  leaders,  and  the  government  case 
sustained  before  the  public.  The  economic  ac- 
tivities of  the  rank  and  file  of  the  I.  W.  W.,  how- 
ever, have  not  been  interfered  with,  and  their 
meeting  halls  in  the  Northwest  continue  thronged 
and  the  center  of  their  strike  activity.  *  A  IMrs. 
Sandburg,  a  Finnish  woman,  widow,  with  two 
children  of  three  and  six,  lives  on  a  small  farm 
near  Seattle.  Being  destitute  she  had  been 
awarded  a  mothers'  pension  by  King  County,  On 
November  17  of  this  year  this  pension  was  cut  off 

*  It  must  be  remembered  that  thk  statement  was  ■nTittcn  in 
November,  1917. 


128  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

and  the  woman  recommended  for  deportation  be- 
cause federal  officers  asserted  that  "she  was  ac- 
tively working  in  the  interests  of  the  I.  W.  W., 
meetings  had  been  held  at  her  home,  and  mem- 
bers of  the  organization  had  visited  there  fre- 
quently." Nothing  could  be  more  ingeniously 
done  to  focus  the  interest  of  a  large  unrestful 
labor  group  in  the  state  of  Washington  on  syn- 
dicalism than  this  incident.  This  well-intentioned 
and  conventionally  patriotic  act  is  not  merely  in- 
opportune, it  is  unhappily  creative.  The  great 
emotional  outflow  stimulated  into  existence  by 
the  startling  announcement  of  our  national  dan- 
ger is  being  transferred  from  its  desirable  nation- 
alistic object  and  focused  on  such  activities,  dis- 
tressing both  socially  and  economically.  It  seems 
an  accurate  example  of  the  Freudian  iibertragung, 
the  transference  of  emotional  expression. 

It  is  a  far  cry  from  pseudo-political  eco- 
nomic problems  to  a  consideration  of  the  delin- 
quencies of  modern  economics,  but  there  is  a  vital 
relation.  Our  conventional  economics  today 
analyzes  no  phase  of  industrialism  nor  the  wage 
relationship,  nor  citizenship  in  pecuniary  society, 
in  a  manner  to  offer  a  key  to  such  distressing  and 
complex  problems  as  this.    Human  nature  riots 


MOTIVES  IN  ECONOMIC  LIFE         129 

today  through  our  economic  structure  with  ridi- 
cule and  destruction,  and  we  economists  look  on 
helpless  and  aghast.  The  menace  of  the  war  does 
not  seem  potent  to  quiet  revolt  or  still  class  cries. 
The  anxiety  and  apprehension  of  the  economist 
should  not  be  produced  by  this  cracking  of  his 
economic  system,  but  by  the  poverty  of  the 
criticism  of  industrialism  which  his  science  offers. 
Why  are  economists  mute  in  the  presence  of  a 
most  obvious  crisis  in  our  industrial  society?  Why 
have  our  criticisms  of  industrialism  no  sturdy 
warnings  about  this  unhappy  evolution?  Why 
does  an  agitated  officialdom  search  today  in  vain 
among  our  writings  for  scientific  advice  touching 
labor  inefficiency  or  industrial  disloyalty,  for 
prophecies  and  plans  about  the  rise  in  our  indus- 
trialism of  economic  classes  unharmonious  and 
hostile? 

The  fair  answer  seems  this:  We  economists 
speculate  little  on  human  motives.  We  are  not 
curious  about  the  great  basis  of  fact  which  dy- 
namic and  behavioristic  psychology  has  gathered 
to  illustrate  the  instinct  stimulus  to  human  ac- 
tivity. Most  of  us  are  not  interested  to  think  of 
what  a  psychologically  full  or  satisfying  life  is. 
We  are  not  curious  to  know  that  a  great  school  of 


130  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

behavior  analysis  called  the  Freudian  has  been 
built  around  the  analysis  of  the  energy  outbursts, 
brought  by  society's  balking  of  the  native  human 
instincts.  Our  economic  literature  shows  that 
we  are  but  rarely  curious  to  know  whether  in- 
dustrialism is  suited  to  man's  inherited  nature, 
or  what  man  in  turn  will  do  to  our  rules  of 
economic  conduct  in  case  these  rules  are  re- 
pressive. The  motives  to  economic  activity 
which  have  done  the  major  service  in  orthodox 
economic  texts  and  teachings  have  been  either  the 
vague  middle-class  virtues  of  thrift,  justice,  and 
solvency;  or  the  equally  vague  moral  sentiments 
of  "striving  for  the  welfare  of  others,"  "desire  for 
the  larger  self,"  "desire  to  equip  oneself  well" ;  or 
lastly,  that  labor-saving  deduction  that  man  is 
stimulated  in  all  things  economic  by  his  desire  to 
satisfy  his  wants  with  the  smallest  possible  effort. 
All  this  gentle  parody  in  motive  theorizing  con- 
tinued contemporaneously  with  the  output  of  the 
rich  literature  of  social  and  behavioristic  psychol- 
ogy which  was  almost  entirely  addressed  to  this 
very  problem  of  human  motives  in  modern  eco- 
nomic society.  Noteworthy  exceptions  are  the 
remarkable  series  of  books  by  Veblen,  the  articles 
and  criticisms  of  Mitchell  and  Patten,  and  the 


MOTIVES  IN  ECONOMIC  LIFE         131 

most  significant  small  book  by  Taussig  entitled 
Inventors  and  Money-Makers.  It  is  this  com- 
plementary field  of  psychology  to  which  the 
economists  must  turn  as  these  writers  have  turned 
for  a.  vitalization  of  their  basic  hypotheses. 
There  awaits  them  a  bewildering  array  of  studies 
of  the  motives,  emotions,  and  folk  ways  of  our 
pecuniary  civilization.  Generalizations  and  ex- 
periment statistics  abound  ready-made  for  any 
structure  of  economic  criticism.  The  human 
motives  are  isolated,  described,  compared.  Busi- 
ness confidence,  the  release  of  work  energy, 
advertising  appeal,  market  vagaries,  the  basis  of 
value  computations,  decay  of  workmanship,  the 
labor  unrest,  decline  in  the  thrift  habit,  are  the 
subjects  treated.  A  brief  list  of  these  economic- 
psychologists  is  impressive:  Veblen,  Thorndike, 
HoUingworth,  Dewey,  James,  Watson,  Holt, 
Thomas,  Stanley  Hall,  Jastrow,  Patrick,  Hob- 
house,  MacDougall,  Hart,  Shand,  Wallas,  Lipp- 
mann,  Freud,  Jung,  Prince,  Southard,  Glueck,  Brill, 
Bailey,  Paton,  Cannon,  Crile,  and  so  on.  One 
might  say,  with  fairness,  that  each  one  of  these 
has  contributed  criticism  touching  the  springs  of 
human  activity  of  which  no  economic  theorist  can 
afford  to  plead  ignorance.    The  stabilizing  of  the 


132  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

science  of  psychology  and  the  vogue  among  econ- 
omists of  the  scientific  method  will  not  allow  these 
psychological  findings  to  be  shouldered  out  by  the 
careless  a  priori  deductions  touching  human  na- 
ture which  still  dominate  our  orthodox  texts.  The 
confusion  and  metaphysical  propensities  of  our 
economic  theory,  our  neglect  of  the  consequences 
of  child  labor,  our  lax  interest  in  national  vitality 
and  health,  the  unusableness  of  our  theories  of 
labor  unrest  and  of  labor  efficiency,  our  careless 
reception  of  problems  of  population,  eugenics,  sex, 
and  birth  control ;  our  crass  ignorance  of  the  rela- 
tion of  industry  to  crime,  industry  to  feeble-mind- 
edness,  industry  to  functional  insanity,  industry 
to  education;  and  our  astounding  indifference  to 
the  field  of  economic  consumption  —  all  this  de- 
linquency can  be  traced  back  to  our  refusal  to  see 
that  economics  was  social  economics,  and  that  a 
full  knowledge  of  man,  his  instincts,  his  power  of 
habit  acquisition,  his  psychological  demands  and 
endurance  were  an  absolute  prerequisite  to  clear 
and  purposeful  thinking  on  our  industrial  civi- 
lization. MacDougall,  the  Oxford  social  psychol- 
ogist, said  in  direct  point:  "Political  economy 
suffered  hardly  less  from  the  crude  nature  of  the 
psychological  assumptions  from  which  it  pro- 


MOTIVES  IN  ECONOMIC  LIFE         133 

fessed  to  deduce  the  explanations  of  its  facts,  and 
its  prescriptions  for  economic  legislation.  It  would 
be  a  libel  not  altogether  devoid  of  truth  to  say 
that  the  classical  political  economy  was  a  tissue  of 
false  conclusions  drawn  from  false  psychological 
assumptions." 

What  then  are  the  facts  of  human  nature  which 
the  newer  psychology  offers  as  the  beginning  of 
economic  theorizing? 

Man  is  bom  into  his  world  accompanied  by  a 
rich  psychical  disposition  which  furnishes  him 
ready-made  all  his  motives  for  conduct,  all  his 
desires,  economic  or  wasteful,  moral  or  depraved, 
crass  or  aesthetic.  He  can  show  a  demand  for 
nothing  that  is  not  prompted  by  this  galaxy  of 
instincts.  He  is  a  mosaic  of  unit  tendencies  to 
react  faithfully  in  certain  ways  when  certain 
stimuli  are  present.  As  MacDougall  has  graphic- 
ally put  it,  "Take  away  these  instinctive  disposi- 
tions with  their  powerful  impulses  and  the  human 
organism  would  become  incapable  of  activity  of 
any  kind;  it  would  lie  inert  and  motionless  like  a 
wonderful  clockwork  whose  mainspring  had  been 
removed  or  a  steam  engine  whose  fires  had  been 
drawn.  These  impulses  are  the  mental  forces 
which  maintain  and  shape  all  the  life  of  individ- 
uals and  societies,  and  in  them  we  are  confronted 


134  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

with  the  central  mystery  of  life  and  mind  and 
wiU." 

Thorndike,  the  Columbia  psychologist,  in  his 
analysis  of  human  motives,  has  written,  "The 
behavior  of  man  in  the  family,  in  business,  in  the 
state,  in  religion,  and  in  every  other  affair  of  life, 
is  rooted  in  his  unlearned  original  equipment  of 
instincts  and  capacities.  All  schemes  of  improv- 
ing human  life  must  take  account  of  man's  orig- 
inal nature,  most  of  all  when  their  aim  is  to 
counteract  it." 

Veblen  wrote  in  his  book.  The  Instinct  of  Work- 
manship, "for  mankind,  as  for  the  other  higher 
animals,  the  life  of  the  species  is  conditioned  by 
the  complement  of  instinctive  proclivities,  and 
tropismatic  aptitudes  with  which  the  species  is 
typically  endowed.  Not  only  is  the  continued  life 
of  the  race  dependent  upon  the  adequacy  of  its 
instinctive  proclivities  in  this  way,  but  the  rou- 
tine and  details  of  its  life  are  also,  in  a  last  resort, 
determined  by  these  instincts.  These  are  the 
prime  movers  in  human  behavior,  as  in  the  be- 
havior of  all  those  animals  that  show  self -direction 
or  discretion.  The  human  activity,  in  so  far  as  it 
can  be  spoken  of  as  conduct,  can  never  exceed  the 
scope  of  these  instinctive  dispositions  by  initia- 


MOTIVES  IN  ECONOMIC  LIFE         135 

tive  of  which  man  takes  action.  Nothing  falls 
within  the  human  scheme  of  things  desirable  to  be 
done  except  what  answers  to  these  native  pro- 
clivities of  man.  These  native  proclivities  alone 
make  anything  worth  while,  and  out  of  their 
working  emerge  not  only  the  purpose  and  effi- 
ciency of  life  but  its  substantial  pleasures  and 
pains  as  well." 

John  Dewey  wrote  in  his  Democracy  in  Edu- 
cation: "The  instinct  activities  may  be  called, 
metaphorically,  spontaneous  in  the  sense  that  the 
organs  give  a  strong  bias  for  a  certain  sort  of  op- 
eration —  a  bias  so  strong  that  we  cannot  go  con- 
trary to  it,  though  by  trying  to  go  contrary  we 
may  pervert,  stunt,  and  corrupt  them." 

Cannon,  the  Harvard  physiologist,  has  said: 
"More  and  more  it  is  appearing  that  in  men  of 
all  races,  and  in  most  of  the  higher  animals,  the 
springs  of  action  are  to  be  found  in  the  influences 
of  certain  emotions  which  express  themselves  in 
characteristic  instinctive  acts." 

Instincts  to  their  modern  possessor  seem  un- 
reasoning and  unrational,  and  often  embarrassing. 
To  the  race,  however,  they  are  an  efficient  and 
tried  guide  to  conduct,  for  they  are  the  result  of 
endless  experiments  of  how  to  fight,  to  grow,  to 


136  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

procreate,  under  the  ruthless  valuing  mechanism 
of  the  competition  for  survival.  These  instincts 
have  in  the  most  complete  sense  of  the  word, 
survival  value.  In  fact,  outside  of  some  rela- 
tively unimportant  bodily  attributes,  the  instincts 
are  all  that  our  species  in  its  long  evolution  has 
considered  worth  saving.  When  one  considers 
the  unarmed  state  in  which  the  soft-bodied 
human  is  shoved  out  in  the  world  to  fight  for 
his  existence  against  creatures  with  thick  hides, 
vise-like  jaws,  and  claws,  it  becomes  clearly 
evident  that  if  man  had  not  been  equipped  with 
an  instinctive  and  unlearned  code  of  efficient  com- 
petition behavior  his  struggle  on  this  earth  would 
have  been  brief  and  tragic.  And  also  in  contrast 
with  his  own  remote  ape  ancestors,  one  could  in 
retrospect  see  that  the  survival  of  the  human 
species  must  have  had  as  a  prerequisite  a  rich  and 
varied  instinct  equipment  which  removed  man 
from  the  necessity  of  learning  a  complete  scheme 
of  behavior  via  the  dangerous  trial  and  error 
method.  The  species,  without  some  unlearned 
and  protective  capacities,  would  not  have  lasted 
the  instruction.  Within  the  past  ten  thousand 
years  nothing  in  our  brilliant  experiment  with 
the  environment  called  civilization  has  been  long 


MOTIVES  IN  ECONOMIC  LIFE         137 

enough  adhered  to  to  brmg  about  a  psychical  ad- 
justment capable  of  physical  inheritance,  and  so 
the  basic  motives  of  the  business  man  today  re- 
main those  of  his  cave  ancestor.  The  contribu- 
tion of  civilization  has  been  merely  an  accumu- 
lation of  more  or  less  useful  traditions  touching 
habits  accidental  in  character  and  questionable 
in  desirability. 

All  human  activity,  then,  is  untiringly  actuated 
by  the  demand  for  realization  of  the  instinct 
wants.  If  an  artificially  limited  field  of  human 
endeavor  be  called  economic  life,  all  of  its  so- 
called  motives  hark  directly  back  to  the  human 
instincts  for  their  origin.  There  are,  in  truth,  no 
economic  motives  as  such.  The  motives  of  eco- 
nomic life  are  the  same  as  those  of  the  life  of  art, 
of  vanity  and  ostentation,  of  war  and  crime,  of 
sex.  Economic  life  is  merely  the  life  in  which  in- 
stinct gratification  is  alleged  to  take  on  a  rational 
pecuniary  habit  form.  Man  is  not  less  a  father 
with  a  father's  parental  instinct-interest  just  be- 
cause he  passes  down  the  street  from  his  home  to 
his  oflSce.  His  business  raid  into  his  rival's  mar- 
ket has  the  same  naive  charm  that  tickled  the 
heart  of  his  remote  ancestor  when  in  the  night  he 
rushed  the  herds  of  a  near-by  clan.    A  manufac- 


138  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

turer  tries  to  tell  a  conventional  world  that  he 
resists  the  closed  shop  because  it  is  un-American, 
it  loses  him  money,  or  is  inefficient.  A  few  years 
ago  he  was  more  honest  when  he  said  he  would 
run  his  business  as  he  wished  and  would  allow  no 
man  to  tell  him  what  to  do.  His  instinct  of 
leadership,  reinforced  powerfully  by  his  innate 
instinctive  revulsion  to  the  conJEinement  of  the 
closed  shop,  gave  the  true  stimulus.  His  oppo- 
sition is  psychological,  not  ethical. 

The  importance  to  me  of  the  description  of  the 
innate  tendencies  or  instincts  to  be  here  given  lies 
in  their  relation  to  my  main  explanation  of  eco- 
nomic behavior,  which  is: 

First,  that  these  instinct  tendencies  are  persistent, 
are  far  less  warped  or  modified  by  the  environment 
than  we  believe ;  that  they  function  quite  as  they  have 
for  a  hundred  thousand  years ;  that  they,  as  motives  in 
their  various  normal  or  perverted  habit  form,  can  at 
times  dominate  singly  the  entire  behavior  and  act  as 
if  they  were  a  clear  character  dominant. 

Secondly,  that  if  the  environment  through  any  of  the 
conventional  instruments  of  repression,  such  as  ex- 
treme religious  orthodoxy,  economic  inferiority,  im- 
prisonment, or  physical  disfigurement,  such  as  short 
stature  or  a  crippled  body,  repress  the  full  psy- 
chological expression  in  the  field  of  the  instinct 
tendencies,  then  a  psychic  revolt,  a  slipping  into  ab- 


MOTIVES  IN  ECONOMIC  LIFE         139 

normal  mental  functioning,  takes  place,  with  the 
usual  result  that  society  accuses  this  revolutionist  of 
being  either  wilfully  ineflficient,  alcoholic,  a  syndi- 
calist, supersensitive,  an  agnostic,  or  insane. 

Convention  has  judged  the  normal  man  in  eco- 
nomic society  to  be  that  individual  who  main- 
tains a  certain  business  placidity,  is  solvent,  safe 
and  not  irritating  to  the  delicate  structure  of 
credit.  Trotter,  the  English  social  psychologist, 
has  said  that  today's  current  normality  has  noth- 
ing to  do  with  either  stability  of  institutions  or 
human  progress.  Its  single  important  character- 
istic is  that  it  is  conventional.  He  urges  the  im- 
perative need  of  a  new  concept  of  economic 
normality. 

Perhaps  one  should  stop  to  most  seriously  em- 
phasize this  concept  of  a  new  human  normality, 
and  also  to  appreciate  the  handicap  to  discussion 
which  comes  when  every  analyzer  at  a  round  table 
has  a  very  different  brand  of  human  normality 
in  mind.  There  is  that  theoretical  100  per  cent 
normality  which  is  gained  for  the  individual  by 
free  mobility  plus  a  full  and  fine  environmental 
equipment  of  persons  and  instruments,  and  which 
results  in  a  harmonious  and  full  expression  of  his 
psychic  potentialities.     Since  each  vigorous  life 


140  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

lived  under  these  conditions  would  generate  wis- 
dom in  direct  proportion  to  it,  I  think  that  an 
evolutionary  and  also  conventionally  desirable 
progress  could  be  prophesied  as  a  result.  This 
progress  has  no  so-called  idealistic  goal  or  direc- 
tion. It  has  merely  a  potentiality  for  more  wis- 
dom, and  that  wisdom  might  lead  to  any  of  count- 
less possible  developments. 

A  second  normality  would  be  that  produced  by 
that  freedom  in  instinct  expression  and  that  en- 
vironment which  would  give  far  more  unconven- 
tional experimentation,  far  more  wisdom  than  we 
HOW  have,  but  not  the  amount  which  would  crack 
social  life  by  hurrying  the  change  of  traditions  too 
much,  or  destroy  those  civilization  institutions 
which  could  be  modified  with  some  hope  of  their 
higher  usefulness.  Conscious  that  man  will 
change,  if  he  is  to  change,  to  this  latter  compro- 
mise-normality concept,  it  is  such  a  normality 
that  I  have  in  mind  when  I  use  the  term. 

In  estabhshing  a  catalogue  of  instinct  unit 
characters,  one  must  first  meet  Thorndike's  criti- 
cism of  such  a  scheme.  He  sees  the  evolution  in 
instinct  theorizing  toward  an  acceptance  of  the 
theory  that  there  are  innumerable  special  situa- 
tions and  special  stimuli  each  possessed  of  its 


MOTIVES  IN  ECONOMIC  LIFE         141 

particular  behavior  reflex.  All  the  important 
new  evidence  seems  to  back  up  this  Thorndike 
contention.  However,  if  the  behavior  analysis 
is  a  less  delicate  one  and  laboratory  exactness  is 
not  demanded,  and  if  merely  consistent  behavior 
tendencies  are  the  objects  of  classification,  it  seems 
not  unreasonable  to  build  up  a  working  hypothe- 
sis in  the  concrete  form  of  general  unit  characters 
of  behavior.  The  innumerable  distinct  reflex 
acts  described  by  Thorndike  separate  out,  as  he 
in  truth  has  separated  them,  into  useful  groups. 
These  groups  can,  with  great  analysis  efficiency, 
be  used  as  unit  characters  and,  properly  named, 
can  make  up  a  usable  catalogue  of  man's  inherited 
social  tendencies.    This  the  writer  has  attempted. 

The  following  catalogue  of  instincts  includes 
those  motives  to  conduct  which,  under  observa- 
tion, are  found  to  be  unlearned,  are  universal  in 
the  species,  and  which  must  be  used  to  explain  the 
innumerable  similarities  in  behavior,  detached  in 
space  and  time  from  each  other. 

I.  Instinct  of  gregariousness.  —  This  innate 
tendency  is  exemplified  in  two  ways.  Modern 
economic  history  is  full  of  that  strange  irrational 
phenomenon,  "the  trek  to  the  city."  Even  in 
thinly  settled  Australia,  half  the  population  lives 


142  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

in  a  few  great  cities  on  the  coast.  In  South 
America  and  on  the  Pacific  Coast,  this  same  ab- 
normal agglomeration  of  folk  has  taken  place. 
The  extraordinary  piling-up  of  labor  masses  in 
modem  London,  Berlin,  New  York,  Chicago,  has 
created  cities  too  large  for  economic  efficiency,  for 
recreation  or  sanitation,  and  yet,  despite  their  in- 
efficiencies and  the  food  and  fire  risk,  the  massing- 
up  continues.  Factory  employment,  though 
speeded  up  and  paid  low  wages,  grows  popular  for 
it  caters  to  gregariousness,  and  domestic  service 
is  shunned  for  it  is  a  lonely  job.  Huddle  and 
congestion  seem  the  outstanding  characteristics 
of  the  modern  city. 

The  second  exemplification  is  seen  in  man's  ex- 
treme sensitiveness  to  the  opinion  of  his  group  — 
which  is  an  irrational  gregarious  reflex.  This  in- 
stinct is  the  psychic  basis  for  his  proclivity  to 
react  to  mob  suggestion  and  hysteria.  In  a  strike, 
each  striker  has  a  perfectly  biological  capacity  for 
violence  if  the  group  seems  to  will  it.  Because  of 
this  same  gregariousness,  a  panic  can  sweep  Wall 
Street,  or  an  anti-pacifist  murmur  turn  into  per- 
secution and  near-lynching.  The  crowd  members 
find  themselves  fatally  gripped  in  the  mob  drift, 
they  press  forward  willingly,  all  yell,  and  all  shake 


MOTIVES  IN  ECONOMIC  LIFE         143 

fists  and  the  most  gentle  spirited  will  find  himself 
pulling  at  the  lynch  rope.  Royce  has  said,  "Woe 
to  the  society  which  belittles  the  power  and 
menace  of  the  mob  mind."  The  lonely  sheep- 
herders  become  in  the  end  irrational,  and  solitary 
confinement  ends  in  insanity  or  submission. 

The  slavish  following  of  fashion  and  fads  is 
rooted  in  gregariousness,  and  the  most  important 
marketing  problem  is  to  guess  the  vagaries  of 
desire  which  the  mob  spirit  may  select.  A  great 
crowd  or  festival  is  satisfying  for  its  own  sake. 
The  installation  of  a  president  of  a  university 
needs  behind  the  rows  of  intellectual  delegates  a 
mass  of  mere  onlooking  humanity,  and  it  gets  it 
by  various  naive  maneuvers.  Crowds  seldom  dis- 
perse as  rapidly  as  they  might.  They  are  loath 
to  destroy  their  crowdishness,  and  therefore  ir- 
rationally hang  about.  If  gregariousness  should 
weaken,  a  panic  would  seize  municipal  values,  and 
professional  baseball,  the  advertising  business, 
and  world  fairs  and  conventions  would  become 
impossible. 

2.  Instinct  of  parental  bent:  motherly  be- 
havior: kindliness.  —  In  terms  of  sacrifice  this  is 
the  most  powerful  of  all  instincts.  This  instinct, 
whose  main  concern  is  the  cherishing  of  the  young 


144  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

through  their  helpless  period,  is  strong  in  women 
and  weak  in  men.  The  confident  presence  in  eco- 
nomic life  of  such  anti-child  influences  as  the 
saloons,  licensed  prostitution,  child  labor,  the  po- 
lice control  of  juvenile  delinquency,  can  be  well 
explained  by  the  fact  that  political  control  has 
been  an  inheritance  of  the  socially  indifferent 
male  sex.  The  coming  of  women  into  the  fran- 
chise promises  many  interesting  and  profound 
economic  changes.  What  little  conservation  ex- 
ists today  goes  back  to  the  male  parental  instinct 
for  its  rather  feeble  urge. 

The  disinterested  indignation  over  misery-pro- 
voking acts  which  comes  from  the  parental  in- 
stinct is  the  base  stimulus  to  law  and  order,  and 
furnishes  the  nebulous  but  efficient  force  behind 
such  social  vagaries  as  the  Anti-Saloon  League, 
Society  for  the  Prevention  of  Cruelty  to  Animals, 
the  Associated  Charities,  the  movement  for  juve- 
nile courts,  prison  reform,  Belgian  relief,  the 
Child  Labor  League.  The  competitive  egotism  of 
pecuniary  society  has  stifled  the  habits  which  ex- 
press the  parental  bent.  We  are  not  habituated 
to  humanitarianism. 

3.  Instinct  of  curiosity:  manipulation:  work- 
manship. —  Curiosity  and  its  attendant  desire  to 


MOTIVES  IN  ECONOMIC  LIFE         145 

draw  near,  and  if  possible  to  manipulate  the  curi- 
ous object,  are  almost  reflex  in  their  simplicity. 
Of  more  economic  applicability  is  the  innate  bent 
toward  workmanship.  Veblen  has  said  that  man 
has  "a  taste  for  effective  work,  and  a  distaste  for 
futile  effort."  This  desire  and  talent  that  man 
has  to  mould  material  to  fancied  ends,  be  the 
material  clay  or  the  pawns  in  diplomacy,  explains 
much  of  human  activity,  while  wages  explain 
little.  Prisoners  have  a  horror  of  prison  idleness. 
Clerks  drift  out  of  stereotyped  ofl&ce  work,  and  the 
monotony  of  modern  industrialism  has  created  a 
new  type  of  migratory  worker.  As  James  has  said, 
"Constructiveness  is  a  genuine  and  irresistible  in- 
stinct in  man  as  in  the  bee  or  beaver."  Man  is 
then  not  naturally  lazy,  but  innately  industrious. 
Where  laziness  exists  it  is  an  artificial  habit,  in- 
culcated by  civilization.  Man  has  a  true  quality 
sense  in  what  he  does:  there  is,  then,  a  "dignity  of 
labor,"  and  it  is  the  job  and  the  industrial  en- 
vironment that  produce  the  slacker,  and  not  the 
laborer's  willful  disposition. 

4.  Instinct  of  acquisition:  collecting:  owner- 
ship.—  Man  lusts  for  land,  and  goes  eagerly  to 
the  United  States,  to  South  America,  to  Africa 
for  it.    It  is  the  real  basis  of  colonial  policy  and 


146  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

gives  much  of  the  interest  to  peace  parleys.  A 
landless  proletariat  is  an  uneasy,  thwarted  mili- 
tant proletariat.  The  cure  for  unruly  Ireland  is 
proven  to  be  peasant  proprietorship,  and  the  so- 
cial menace  in  the  American  labor  world  is  the 
homeless  migratory  laborer.  Russian  peasants  re- 
volted for  land,  and  this  is  the  single  consistent 
note  in  the  anarchy  chaos  in  Mexico.  Man,  much 
of  the  time,  acquires  for  the  mere  sake  of  acquir- 
ing. A  business  man  is  never  rich  enough.  If, 
however,  making  more  money  uses  his  acquisitive 
capacities  too  little,  he  may  throw  this  cultivated 
habit-activity  into  acquiring  Van  Dykes  or 
bronzes  or  Greek  antiques,  or  on  a  smaller  and 
less  aesthetic  scale,  postage  stamps,  signatures,  or 
shaving  mugs.  Asylums  are  full  of  pitiful,  eco- 
nomic persons  who,  lost  to  the  laws  of  social  life, 
continue  as  automatons  to  follow  an  unmodified 
instinct  in  picking  up  and  hoarding  pins,  leaves, 
scraps  of  food,  paper.  The  savings  banks  in  large 
part  depend  on  this  inborn  tendency  for  their 
right  to  exist. 

5.  Instinct  of  fear  and  flight.  —  Man  has  the 
capacity  to  be  fearful  under  many  conditions.  His 
most  important  fear  from  an  economic  standpoint 
is  the  stereotyped  worker's  or  business  man's 


MOTIVES  IN  ECONOMIC  LIFE         147 

worry  over  the  insecure  future.  This  anxiety  or 
apprehension  which  is  so  plentiful  up  and  down 
the  scale  of  economic  life  has  a  profound  and  dis- 
tressing influence  on  the  digestive  tract,  and  ii? 
turn  on  the  general  health.  Much  of  nervous  in- 
digestion so  common  in  the  ruthless  economic 
competition  of  today  is  "fear-indigestion,"  is  in- 
stinct reaction,  and  can  only  be  cured  by  removing 
the  cause.  This  removal  of  the  cause  is  performed 
many  times  by  an  equally  instinctive  act,  flight. 
Flight  in  business  may  take  the  conventional  form 
of  retirement  or  selling  out,  but  often  adopts  the 
unique  method  of  bankruptcy,  insanity,  or  sui- 
cide. 

6.  Instinct  of  mental  activity:  thought.  —  To 
quote  Thorndike :  "This  potent  mover  [workman- 
ship] of  men's  economic  and  recreated  activities 
has  its  taproot  in  the  instinct  of  multiform  mental 
and  physical  activity."  To  be  mentally  active,  to 
do  something,  is  instinctively  satisfying.  Much  of 
invention  springs  costless  from  a  mind  thinking 
for  the  sheer  joy  of  it.  Organization  plans  in 
industry,  schemes  for  market  extension,  visions  of 
ways  to  power,  all  agitate  neurones  in  the  brain 
ready  and  anxious  to  give  issue  in  thought.  A 
duty  of  the  environment  is  not  only  to  allow,  but 


148  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

to  encourage,  states  in  which  meditation  naturally 
occurs. 

7.  The  housing  or  settling  instinct.  —  In  its 
simplest  form,  the  gunny-sack  tents  of  the  tramps, 
the  playhouses  of  children,  the  camp  in  the  thicket 
of  the  hunter.  The  squatter  has  a  different  feel- 
ing for  his  quarter  section  when  he  has  a  dugout 
on  it.  Man  innately  wants  a  habitation  into 
which  he  can  retire  to  sleep  or  to  nurse  his  wounds, 
physical  or  social.  The  Englishman's  home  is 
his  castle. 

8.  Instinct  of  migration:  homing.  —  To  every 
man  the  coming  of  spring  suggests  moving  on. 
The  hobo  migration  begins  promptly  with  the  first 
sunshine,  and  the  tramp  instinct  fills  Europe  with 
questing  globe-trotters.  The  advice,  "Go  West, 
young  man,"  was  not  obeyed  on  account  of  the 
pecuniary  gain  alone,  but  because  the  venture 
promised  satisfaction  to  the  instinct  to  migrate  as 
well. 

9.  Instinct  of  hunting.  —  Man  survived  in 
earlier  ages  through  destroying  his  rivals  and  kill- 
ing his  game,  and  these  tendencies  bit  deep  into 
his  psychic  make-up.  Modem  man  delights  in  a 
prize  fight  or  a  street  brawl,  even  at  times  joys  in 
ill  news  of  his  own  friends,  has  poorly  concealed 


MOTIVES  IN  ECONOMIC  LIFE         149 

pleasure  if  his  competition  wrecks  a  business  rival, 
falls  easily  into  committing  atrocities  if  conven- 
tional policing  be  withdrawn,  kills  off  a  trade 
union,  and  is  an  always  possible  member  of  a 
lynching  party.  He  is  still  a  hunter  and  reverts  to 
his  primordial  hunt  habits  with  disconcerting  zest 
and  expediency.  Historic  revivals  of  the  hunt- 
ing urge  make  an  interesting  recital  of  religious 
inquisitions,  witch  burnings,  college  hazings,  per- 
secution of  suffragettes,  of  the  I.  W.  W.,  of  the 
Japanese,  or  pacifists.  All  this  goes  on  often  under 
naive  rationalization  about  justice  and  patriotism, 
but  it  is  pure  and  innate  lust  to  run  something 
down  and  hurt  it. 

10.  Instinct  of  anger:  pugnacity.  —  In  its 
bodily  preparation  for  action,  anger  is  identical 
with  fear,  and  fear  constitutes  the  most  violent 
and  unreasoning  of  purposeful  dispositions  in 
man.  Caught  up  in  anger,  all  social  modifications 
of  conduct  tend  to  become  pale,  and  man  func- 
tions in  primordial  attack  and  defense.  Anger  and 
its  resulting  pugnacity  have  as  their  most  com- 
mon excitant  the  balking  or  thwarting  of  another 
instinct,  and  this  alone  explains  why  man  has  so 
jealousy,  through  all  ages,  fought  for  liberty. 
Pugnacity  is  the  very  prerequisite  of  individual 


150  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

progress.  Employers  fight  a  hampering  union, 
unions  a  dogmatic  employer;  every  imprisoned 
man  is,  in  reality,  psychically  incorrigible;  stu- 
dents rebel  against  an  autocratic  teacher;  street 
boys  gang  together  to  fight  a  bully;  nations  are 
ever  ready,  yes,  hoping,  to  fight,  and  their  mem- 
ory of  the  cost  of  war  is  biologically  rendered  a 
short  one.  In  fighting,  there  is  a  subtle  reversion 
to  the  primitive  standards,  and  early  atrocities 
become  the  trench  vogue  of  later  months.  Pa- 
triotism without  fighting  seems,  to  western  na- 
tions, a  pallid  thing.  Most  of  the  vigorous  phases 
of  modem  civilization  remain  highly  competitive 
and  warlike.  Ethics  has  a  long  psychological  way 
to  go  in  its  vitally  necessary  task  of  sublimating 
the  pugnacious  bent  in  man. 

11.  Instinct  of  revolt  at  confinement:  at  being 
limited  in  liberty  of  action  and  choice.  —  As  above 
noted,  man  revolts  violently  at  any  oppression,  be 
it  of  body  or  soul.  Being  held  physically  helpless 
produces  in  man  and  animals  such  profound  func- 
tional agitation  that  death  can  ensue.  Passive 
resistance  can  only  be  possible  when  nearly 
all  of  man's  inherited  nature  is  removed.  In 
primitive  days,  being  held  was  immediately  ante- 
cedent to  being  eaten,  and  the  distaste  of  physical 


MOTIVES  IN  ECONOMIC  LIFE         151 

helplessness  is  accordingly  deep-seated.  Belgium 
would  rather  resist  than  live;  an  I.  W.  W.  would 
rather  go  to  jail  than  come  meekly  off  his  soap 
box;  the  militant  suffragettes  go  through  the  de- 
pravity of  forced  feeding  rather  than  suffer  their 
inequality;  and  the  worker  will  starve  his  family 
to  gain  recognition  for  his  union.  Man  will  die 
for  liberty,  and  droops  in  prison.  So  psychically 
revolting  is  confinement  that  the  alienists  have 
been  forced  to  create  a  new  disease,  a  "confine- 
ment insanity,"  a  prison  psychosis. 

12.  Instinct  of  revulsion.  —  The  social  nausea 
which  society  feels  towards  discussions  of  sex, 
venereal  disease,  leprosy,  certain  smells,  is  not 
founded  on  willfulness.  It  is  a  non-intellectual 
and  innate  revulsion  to  the  subject.  It  is  only 
within  the  last  twenty-five  years  that  the  scien- 
tific attitude  itself  has  been  able  to  overcome  this 
instinctive  repugnance  and  attack  these  problems, 
intimate  and  perilous  to  human  society,  which 
have  languished  under  the  taboo. 

13.  Instinct  of  leadership  and  mastery.  —  It 
often  appears  that  man  seeks  leadership  and  mas- 
tery solely  because  their  acquisition  places  him  in 
a  better  position  to  gratify  his  other  instinctive 
promptings.    But  there  also  seems  a  special  grati- 


162  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

fication  in  leading  and  mastery  for  their  own  sake. 
Modem  life  shows  prodigious  effort,  paid  only  in 
the  state  of  being  a  boss  of  the  gang,  a  "leading" 
college  man,  a  "prominent  citizen,"  a  secretary  or 
a  vice-president,  a  militia  captain  or  a  church 
elder.  A  secret  ambition  to  some  day  lead  some 
group  on  some  quest,  be  it  ethical  or  economic,  is 
planted  deep  in  our  nature.  Every  dog  longs  to 
have  his  day. 

14.  Instinct  of  subordination:  submission. — 
In  contrast  to  leadership,  man  longs  at  times  to 
follow  the  fit  leader.  Soldiers  joy  in  a  firm  cap- 
tain, workmen  quit  a  lax  though  philanthropic 
employer,  instructors  thresh  under  an  inefficient 
though  indulgent  department  head.  Eternal  inde- 
pendence and  its  necessary  strife  are  too  wearing 
on  the  common  man  and  he  longs  for  peace  and 
protection  in  the  shadow  of  a  trust-inspiring 
leader.  To  submit  under  right  conditions  is  not 
only  psychically  pleasant,  but  much  of  the  time  to 
be  leaderless  is  definitely  distressing. 

15.  Instinct  of  display:  vanity:  ostentation. — 
This  old  disposition  gives  the  basic  concept  for 
Veblen's  remarkable  analysis  of  the  economic  ac- 
tivities of  America's  leisure  class.  The  particular 
state  of  the  industrial  arts  with  its  trust  control 


MOTIVES  IN  ECONOMIC  LIFE         153 

and  divorce  of  producer  and  consumer,  plus  po- 
litical peace,  has  taken  from  man  his  ancient  op- 
portunity to  show  his  unique  gifts  in  ownership 
of  economic  goods  and  in  valor.  So  he  is  driven  in 
his  yearning  for  attention  to  perverted  activities. 
He  lives  to  waste  conspicuously,  wantonly,  origi- 
nally, and,  by  the  refined  uselessness  of  his  wast- 
ing, to  show  to  the  gaping  world  what  an 
extraordinary  person  he  is.  The  sensitiveness  of 
social  matrons  to  mention  in  the  society  columns, 
the  hysteria  to  be  identified  with  the  changing 
vagaries  of  the  style,  the  fear  of  identification  with 
drab  and  useful  livelihoods,  offer  in  their  infinite 
variety  a  multitude  of  important  economic  phe- 
nomena. 

16.  Instinct  of  sex.  —  Of  the  subjects  vital  to 
an  analysis  of  life,  be  they  aesthetic  or  economic, 
sex  has  suffered  most  from  the  revulsion  taboo. 
Manifestly  an  instinct  which  moulds  behavior  and 
purposeful  planning  profoundly,  sex  as  a  motive- 
concept  is  barred  from  the  economic  door.  De- 
spite the  proven  moral  and  efficiency  problems 
which  arise  with  the  postponement  of  marriage 
due  to  modem  economic  conditions,  the  massing 
of  unmarried  immigrant  men  into  tenement 
rooms,  or  the  condemning  of  some  millions  of  mi- 


154  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

gratory  workers  to  a  womanless  existence,  con- 
ventional morality  meets  every  situation  by 
denying  the  sex  instinct,  by  a  blind  belief  that  in 
some  strange  way  modern  economic  civilization 
allows  its  inmates  "to  mortify  the  deeds  of  the 
body." 

While  at  any  particular  moment  in  our  be- 
havior we  are  a  blend  or  composite  of  many  in- 
stinct activities,  it  is  accurate  to  describe  much  of 
behavior  as  dominated  at  any  one  time  by  either 
a  single  instinct  or  at  most  two  or  three.  A  cer- 
tain environment  can  habituate  man  to  a  special- 
ization in  gratification  of  a  single  or  a  pair  of 
instincts.  For  instance,  war  matures  and  educates 
habits  gratifying  the  instincts  of  pugnacity  and 
hunting.  At  the  war  front,  this  habit  bent  gives 
basis  for  gradually  sloughing  off  the  humane  re- 
strictions governing  the  fighting,  and  armies  mu- 
tually obey  their  new  psychology.  Machine-gun 
men  know  they  will  not  be  taken  prisoner  and 
their  service  is  now  known  as  the  suicide  squad. 
Hospitals  or  undefended  towns  are  bombed,  a  very 
conventional  minimum  of  attention  is  fixed  for 
the  enemy  wounded,  the  primitive  method  of 
warfare  of  the  French  African  troops  which  at 


MOTIVES  IN  ECONOMIC  LIFE         155 

first  disturbed  the  ethics  of  the  Allies  is  now  for- 
gotten under  the  more  liberal  interpretation  under 
the  revamped  war  psychology.  At  home  the 
citizens  of  the  belligerent  countries  gain  a 
cathartic  for  their  overstimulated  pugnacious  bent 
by  rioting  the  People's  Council,  or  tar-and- 
feathering  the  I.  W.  W.,  or  organizing  a  man-hunt 
for  a  lately  immigrated  Austrian  or  German.  It  is 
quite  natural  that  the  actors  in  these  domestic 
dramas  should  build  up  explanatory  rationaliza- 
tions for  their  activity.  It  is  their  mild  bow  to 
the  fast  dimming  conventions  and  traditions  of 
peace.  As  a  gentle  and  aged  lady  deplored,  "I 
cannot  fight,  but  I  can  at  least  go  about  and  listen 
and  report  on  the  unpatriotic." 

The  tongue-tied  and  paralyzed  after-dinner 
speaker  is  a  single-minded  expositor  of  the  strange 
instinct  of  subservience.  The  worried  father  of 
a  sick  child  seated  at  his  office  desk  is  not  an 
economic  man.  His  behavior  is  dominated  by 
the  parental  motive,  and  in  this  fact  is  found  the 
only  explanation  of  his  distracted  conduct.  Veblen 
in  a  shrewd  analysis  of  industrial  evolution  noted 
that  the  early  pre-capitalistic  culture,  with  its 
handicraft  production  and  small  intimate  social 
groups,  stressed  the  habits  which  express  the  in- 


156  THE   CASUAL   LABORER 

8tinct  of  workmanship  and  the  parental  instinct. 
With  the  industrial  revolution  and  the  inuner- 
gence  into  the  pecuniary  scheme  of  things  of  a 
small  property-owning  class  and  a  large  prole- 
tariat, life  presented  habit  opportunities  which 
stressed,  in  the  master  class,  the  so-called  ego- 
tistical instincts  of  leadership,  hunting,  ostenta- 
tion and  vanity,  and  for  the  working  class  re- 
moved the  opportunities  to  express  the  instinct  of 
workmanship  and  reduced  and  restricted  the  other 
avenues  of  expression  or  perverted  them  to  non- 
evolutionary  or  anti-social  behavior.  Instinct 
perversion  rather  than  freely  selected  habits  of 
instinct  expression  seems  broadly  a  just  character- 
ization of  modern  labor-class  life.  Modern  labor 
unrest  has  a  basis  more  psychopathological  than 
psychological,  and  it  seems  accurate  to  describe 
modem  industrialism  as  mentally  insanitary. 

A  remarkable  analysis  of  instinct  dominance 
over  behavior  is  illustrated  by  the  experiments  at 
the  Harvard  Medical  School  and  described  by 
Professor  Cannon.  He  notes  that  among  the  in- 
stinct emotions  active  in  man  those  which  are 
identified  with  a  physical  struggle  for  existence 
have  both  a  physical  and  mechanical  authority 
over  all  other  instinct  urges  to  conduct.    Like  the 


MOTIVES   IN   ECONOMIC    LIFE        157 

military  general  staiBF,  they  shoulder  aside,  in 
times  of  stress,  the  aesthetic  and  peaceful  enthu- 
siasms and  mobilize  every  mental  and  physical 
efficiency  to  their  war  purpose.  The  central 
nervous  system  is  divided  by  Cannon  into  three 
parts,  all  of  which,  under  peace,  function  nor- 
mally. If,  however,  the  brain  be  stimulated  to 
fear  or  anger,  one  of  these  parts,  the  so-called 
"sympathetic  part,"  becomes  the  dictator.  Its 
particular  nerve  fibers  are,  of  the  three  parts,  by 
far  the  most  extensive  in  their  distribution,  and 
permit  immediate  mobilization  of  the  entire  body. 
Its  mobilization  consists  in  "secession  of  processes 
in  the  alimentary  canal,  thus  freeing  the  energy 
supplied  for  other  parts,  the  shifting  of  blood  from 
the  abdominal  organs  whose  activities  are  defer- 
able to  the  organs  immediately  essential  to  mus- 
cular exertion  (the  lungs,  the  heart,  the  central 
nervous  system),  the  increased  vigor  of  contrac- 
tion of  the  heart,  the  quick  abolition  of  the  effects 
of  muscular  fatigue,  the  mobilizing  of  energy- 
giving  sugar  in  the  circulation  —  every  one  of 
these  visceral  changes  is  directly  serviceable  in 
making  the  organism  more  effective  in  the  violent 
display  of  energy  which  fear  or  rage  or  pain  may 
involve." 


158  THE  CASUAL  LABORER 

But  the  most  unique  war-footing  activity  of 
the  body  in  this  vigorous  preparedness  is  the 
functioning  of  the  adrenal  gland.  To  use 
Cannon's  words:  "Adrenin,  secreted  by  the 
adrenal  glands,  in  time  of  stress  or  danger,  plays 
an  essential  role  in  flooding  the  blood  with  sugar, 
distributes  the  blood  to  the  heart,  lungs,  central 
nervous  system  and  limbs,  takes  it  away  from  the 
inhibited  organs  of  the  abdomen,  it  quickly 
abolishes  muscular  fatigue  and  coagulates  the 
blood  on  injury.  These  remarkable  facts  are  fur- 
thermore associated  with  some  of  the  most  primi- 
tive experiences  in  the  life  of  the  higher  organ- 
isms, experiences  conamon  to  man  and  beast  — 
the  elemental  experiences  of  pain  and  fear  and 
rage  that  come  suddenly  in  critical  emergencies." 

The  conclusion  seems  both  scientific  and  logical 
that  behavior  in  anger,  fear,  pain,  and  hunger  is  a 
basically  different  behavior  from  the  behavior 
under  repose  and  economic  security.  The  emo- 
tions generated  under  the  conditions  of  existence- 
peril  seem  to  make  the  emotions  and  motives 
generative  in  quiet  and  peace,  pale  and  unequal. 
It  seems  impossible  to  avoid  the  conclusion  that 
the  most  vital  part  of  man's  inheritance  is  one 
which  destines  him  to  continue  for  some  myriads 


MOTIVES   IN   ECONOMIC    LIFE        159 

of  years  ever  a  fighting  animal  when  certain  con- 
ditions exist  in  his  environment.  Though,  through 
education,  man  be  habituated  in  social  and  in- 
telligent behavior,  or,  through  license,  in  sexual 
debauchery,  still  at  those  times  when  his  life  or 
liberty  is  threatened,  his  instinct-emotional  na- 
ture will  inhibit  either  social  thought  or  sex  ideas, 
and  present  him  as  merely  an  irrational  fighting 
animal. 

Since  every  instinct  inherited  by  man  from  his 
tree  and  cave  ancestors,  literally  sewed  into  his 
motivating  disposition,  has  survival  value,  an  en- 
vironment which  balks  or  thwarts  his  instinct 
expression,  arouses  directly  and  according  to  the 
degree  of  its  menace  this  unreasoning  emotional 
revolt  in  him.  The  chemical  proof  of  this  emo- 
tional revolt  is  found  by  Cannon  even  in  indi- 
viduals suffering  from  vague  states  of  worry  or 
anxiety.  Here  the  single  problem  is  the  manner 
in  which  the  angry  or  fearful  person  coins  his 
revolt  emotion  into  behavior,  and  this  largely  de- 
pends upon  the  right  and  proper  method  which 
society  has  selected  for  expressing  psychical  dis- 
satisfaction. There  are  folk  ways  of  distress  be- 
havior just  as  certainly  as  there  are  of  religious 
enthusiasm  or  patriotism.    Since  the  emotional 


160  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

tone  stimulated  by  the  balking  of  "minor"  in- 
stincts would  naturally  be  lower  than  that  intense 
tone  generated  by  a  threatened  rending  of  one's 
flesh,  or  imprisonment,  to  the  same  degree  is  the 
behavior  stimulated  by  the  lower-toned  emotions 
less  vivid  and  noteworthy  than  the  blind  and 
frantic  resistance  to  the  direct  physical  threat. 
The  behavior  reflex  to  the  emotions  generated  in 
a  state  of  worry,  anxiety,  economic  servility,  or 
personal  humiliation,  instead  of  expressing  itself 
in  violent  revolt,  is  shown  in  states  of  mental  in- 
ertia, loss  of  interest  and  power  of  attention,  labor 
inejQficiency,  drifting  off  the  job,  drink  and  drugs. 
These  behavior  states  which  under  conventional 
and  economic  moral  theorizing  are  barrenly  and 
inaccurately  described  as  willful  acts,  are  ele- 
mental, irrational,  and  blind  reflex  activities. 
Under  conditions  which  allow  the  satisfactory  ex- 
pression of  man's  original  inherited  proclivities, 
this  warlike  specialization  of  the  mind  and  body 
is  avoided.  There  the  cranial  or  sacral  sections  of 
the  peace-footing  "automatic"  section  divide  with 
the  warlike  "sympathetic"  section  the  authority 
over  the  body.  Health  and  nerve  reserve  are  built 
up,  a  quiet  brain  permits  rational  orderings  of  the 
associations  of  the  mind,  social  behavior  habits 


MOTIVES   IN   ECONOMIC   LIFE        161 

can  influence  the  order  and  connections  of  the 
neurones  and  insure  their  perpetuation;  in  short, 
intellectual  progress  becomes  possible. 

The  instincts  and  their  emotions,  coupled  with 
the  obedient  body,  lay  down  in  scientific  and  ex- 
act description  the  motives  which  must  and  will 
determine  human  conduct.  If  a  physical  en- 
vironment set  itself  against  the  expression  of 
these  instinct  motives,  the  human  organism  is 
fully  and  efficiently  prepared  for  a  tenacious  and 
destructive  revolt  against  this  environment;  and 
if  the  antagonism  persist,  the  organism  is  ready 
to  destroy  itself  and  disappear  as  a  species  if  it 
fail  of  a  psychical  mutation  which  would  make 
the  perverted  order  endurable. 

Even  if  labor-class  children  evade  those  re- 
pressive deportment  traditions  that  characterize 
the  life  of  the  middle-class  young,  at  a  later  date 
in  the  life  of  these  working-class  members  certain 
powerful  forces  in  their  environment,  though  they 
work  on  the  less  susceptible  and  less  plastic  na- 
tures of  mature  individuals,  produce  obsessions 
and  thwartings  which  function  at  times,  exclu- 
sively almost,  in  determining  the  behavior  of 
great  classes  of  the  industrial  population.  The 
powerful  forces  of  the  working-class  environment 


162  THE  CASUAL  LABORER 

which  thwart  and  balk  instinct  expression  are 
suggested  in  the  phrases  "monotonous  work," 
"dirty  work,"  "simpUfied  work,"  "mechanized 
work,"  the  "servile  place  of  labor,"  "insecure  ten- 
ure of  the  job,"  "hire  and  fire,"  "winter  unemploy- 
ment," "the  ever  found  union  of  the  poor  district 
with  the  crime  district,"  and  the  "restricated  dis- 
trict of  prostitution,"  the  "open  shop,"  the  "labor 
turnover,"  "poverty,"  the  "bread  lines,"  the  "scrap 
heap,"  "destitution."  If  we  postulate  some  six- 
teen instinct  unit  characters  which  are  present 
under  the  laborer's  blouse  and  insistently  demand 
the  same  gratification  that  is,  with  painful  care, 
planned  for  the  college  student,  in  just  what  kind 
of  perverted  compensations  must  a  laborer  in- 
dulge to  make  endurable  his  existence?  A  western 
hobo  tries  in  a  more  or  less  frenzied  way  to  com- 
pensate for  a  general  all-embracing  thwarting  of 
his  nature  by  a  wonderful  concentration  of  sub- 
limation activities  on  the  wander  instinct.  The 
monotony,  indignity,  dirt,  and  sexual  apologies  of, 
for  instance,  the  unskilled  worker's  life  bring  their 
definite  fixations,  their  definite  irrational,  in- 
feriority obsessions. 

The  balked  laborer  here  follows  one  of  the  two 
described  lines  of  conduct:  First,  he  either  weak- 


MOTIVES   IN   ECONOMIC    LIFE        163 

ens,  becomes  inefficient,  drifts  away,  loses  interest 
in  the  quality  of  his  work,  drinks,  deserts  his  fam- 
ily ;  or  secondly,  he  indulges  in  a  true  type  inferior- 
ity compensation,  and  in  order  to  dignify  himself, 
to  eliminate  for  himself  his  inferiority  in  his  own 
eyes,  he  strikes  or  brings  on  a  strike ;  he  commits 
violence,  or  he  stays  on  the  job  and  injures  ma- 
chinery, or  mutilates  the  materials.  He  is  fit  food 
for  dynamite  conspiracies.  He  is  ready  to  make 
sabotage  a  part  of  his  regular  habit  scheme.  His 
condition  is  one  of  mental  stress  and  unfocused 
psychic  unrest,  and  could  in  all  accuracy  be  called 
a  definite  industrial  psychosis.  He  is  neither  will- 
ful nor  responsible,  he  is  suffering  from  a  stereo- 
typed mental  disease. 

If  one  leaves  the  strata  of  unskilled  labor  and 
investigates  the  higher  economic  classes,  he  finds 
parallel  conditions.  There  is  a  profound  unrest 
and  strong  migratory  tendency  among  depart- 
ment-store employees.  One  New  York  store  with 
less  than  three  thousand  employees  has  thirteen 
thousand  pass  through  its  employ  in  a  year.  Since 
the  establishment  in  American  life  of  big  business 
with  its  extensive  efficiency  systems,  its  order  and 
dehumanized  discipline,  its  caste  system,  as  it 
were,  there  has  developed  among  its  highly  paid 


164  THE   CASUAL  LABORER 

men  a  persistent  unrest,  a  dissatisfaction  and  de- 
cay of  morale  which  is  so  noticeable  and  costly 
that  it  has  received  repeated  attention.  Even  the 
conventional  competitive  efi&ciency  of  American 
business  is  in  grave  question.  I  suggest  that  this 
unrest  is  a  true  revolt  psychosis,  a  definite  mental 
unbalance,  an  efficiency  psychosis,  as  it  were,  and 
has  its  definite  psychic  antecedents;  and  that  our 
present  moralizing  and  guess-solutions  are  both 
hopeless  and  ludicrous. 

The  dynamic  psychology  of  today  describes  the 
present  civilization  as  a  repressive  environment. 
For  a  great  number  of  its  inhabitants,  a  sufficient 
self-expression  is  denied.  There  is  for  those  who 
care  to  see,  a  deep  and  growing  unrest  and 
pessimism.  With  the  increase  in  knowledge  is 
coming  a  new  realization  of  the  irrational  direc- 
tion of  economic  evolution.  The  economists,  how- 
ever, view  economic  inequality  and  life  degrada- 
tion as  objects,  in  truth,  outside  the  science.  Our 
value  concept  is  a  price  mechanism  hiding  behind 
a  phrase.  If  we  are  to  play  a  part  in  the  social 
readjustment  immediately  ahead,  we  must  put 
human  nature  and  human  motives  into  our  basic 
hypotheses.  Our  value  concept  must  be  the  yard- 
stick to  measure  just  how  fully  things  and  insti- 


MOTIVES   IN   ECONOMIC   LIFE        165 

tutions  contribute  to  a  full  psychological  life.  We 
must  know  more  of  the  meaning  of  progress.  The 
domination  of  society  by  one  economic  class  has 
for  its  chief  evil  the  thwarting  of  the  instinct  life 
of  the  subordinate  class  and  the  perversion  of  the 
upper  class.  The  extent  and  characteristics  of 
this  evil  are  only  to  be  estimated  when  we  know 
the  innate  potentialities  and  inherited  propen- 
sities of  man,  and  the  ordering  of  this  knowledge 
and  its  application  to  the  changeable  economic 
structure  is  the  task  before  the  trained  econo- 
mists today. 


APPENDIX 


FOREWORD 

The  following  report  was  written  about  March 
1914.  Its  purpose  was  to  acquaint  the  Governor  with 
actual  conditions  under  which  migratory  and  casual 
labor  lived  and  worked  in  California.  These  con- 
ditions described  were  more  or  less  typical  of  much  of 
farm  and  construction  work  throughout  the  state  at 
that  time.  It  is  only  fair  to  state  that  the  ranch  re- 
ferred to  in  this  specific  report  has  since  been  turned 
into  a  model  labor  camp.  One  must  read  this  de- 
scription of  conditions  as  they  were  to  be  able  to  ap- 
preciate the  fact  that  at  present,  among  other  revo- 
lutionary improvements,  there  is  a  reading  room  for 
men,  with  books,  magazines  and  a  victrola.  Ford  and 
Suhr  are  still  in  jail,  but  the  California  Casual  can 
hardly  recognize  today  the  fly-proof,  sanitary  haunts 
of  his  unscreened,  imgarbaged  past.  The  clean-up  of 
camps  under  the  State  Inunigration  and  Housing  Com- 
mission has  been  a  concrete  accomplished  fact.  It  has 
not  brought  the  millennium  —  for  one  thing  memories 
die  hard.  This  report  was  written  before  the  author 
had  begun  his  psychological  studies.  I  imagine  at  a 
later  date  he  would  have  stressed  more  vividly  the 
fact  that  the  proper  housing  is  but  one  step,  though  a 
vitally  important  step,  toward  peaceful  industrial  re- 
lations.   Even  so,  bad  housing  and  camp  conditions 

169 


170  APPENDIX 

loomed  too  large  in  California  in  1914  to  deserve  any- 
thing less  than  the  spotlight.  -And  a  psychologist 
comes  to  know,  perhaps  better  than  anyone  else,  that 
you  cannot  make  over  the  whole  world  at  once.  It  is 
a  step  forward  to  clean  house. 

In  editing  this  report  to  the  Governor  certain  some- 
what unwilling  concessions  in  the  form  of  omissions 
were  made  to  what  we  are  wont  rather  approvingly  to 
consider  the  sensitive  feelings  of  the  reading  public. 
In  a  measure  such  concessions  are  justified,  yet  it  was 
a  strongly  held  theory  of  the  author  of  this  report  that 
it  was  through  just  such  concessions  that  society  was 
allowed  its  continued  ignorance  in,  and  thereby 
cruelly  inadequate  provisioning  for,  the  physical  and 
psychological  wants  of  the  individual.  Because  of 
social  taboo,  human  beings  must  needs  continue  to 
find  such  satisfaction  of  their  normal  needs  as  is  pos- 
sible under  conditions  which  humiliate  and  degrade. 

No  point  is  made  in  the  original  report  that  is  not 
amply  substantiated  by  affidavits.  In  the  main  these 
afiidavits  have  been  omitted. 

I  cannot  refrain  from  calling  attention  to  one 
phrase  in  this  report  which  I  believe  cannot  be  found 
in  any  writings  of  Carl  Parker's  after  he  began  his 
study  of  psychology.  That  is  the  expression  on 
page  189,  "he  should  have.  ..."  It  comes  peri- 
lously near  what  he  was  wont  to  call  "the  illogic  of 
blaming."  The  last  function  of  the  psychological 
economist  is  to  pass  moral  judgments. 

C.  S.  P. 


A  REPORT 

TO  HIS  EXCELLENCY  HIRAM  W.  JOHNSON,  GOVERNOR  OP 
CALIFORNIA,  BY  THE  COMMISSION  OF  IMMIGRATION 
AND  HOUSING  OF  CALIFORNIA  ON  THE  CAUSES  AND 
ALL  MATTERS  PERTAINING  TO  THE  SO-CALLED 
WHEATLAND  HOP  FIELDS^  RIOT  AND  KILLING  OF 
AUGUST  3,  1913,  AND  CONTAINING  CERTAIN  RECOM- 
MENDATION AS  A  SOLUTION  FOR  THE  PROBLEMS  DIS- 
CLOSED. 

Excellency: 

The  occurrence  known  as  the  Wheatland  Hop 
Fields'  Riot  took  place  on  Sunday  afternoon,  August 
3rd,  1913.  Growing  discontent  among  the  hop  pickers 
over  wages,  neglected  camp  sanitation  and  absence  of 
water  in  the  fields,  had  resulted  in  spasmodic  meet- 
ings of  protest  on  Saturday  and  Sunday  morning,  and 
finally  by  Sunday  noon  in  a  more  or  less  involuntary 
strike.  At  five  o'clock  on  Sunday  about  one  thousand 
pickers  gathered  about  a  dance  pavilion  to  listen  to 
speakers.  Two  automobiles  carrying  a  sheriff's  posse 
drove  up  to  this  meeting  and  officials  armed  with  guns 
and  revolvers  attempted  to  disperse  the  crowd  and  to 
arrest  upon  a  John  Doe  warrant  Richard  Ford,  the 
apparent  leader  of  the  strike.  In  the  ensuing  con- 
fusion shooting  began  and  some  twenty  shots  were 
fired.    Two  pickers,  a  deputy  sheriff  and  tlie  district 

171 


172  APPENDIX 

attOTney  of  the  county,  were  killed.  The  posse  fled 
and  the  camp  remained  unpoliced  until  the  state 
militia  arrived  at  dawn  next  morning. 

The  occurrence  has  grown  from  a  casual,  though 
bloody,  event  in  California  labor  history  into  such  a 
focus  for  discussion  and  analysis  of  the  state's  great 
migratory  labor  problem  that  the  incident  can  well  be 
said  to  begin,  for  the  commonwealth,  a  new  and  mo- 
mentous labor  epoch. 

The  problem  of  vagrancy;  that  of  the  unemployed 
and  the  unemployable ;  the  vexing  conflict  between  the 
right  of  agitation  and  free  speech  and  the  law  re- 
lating to  criminal  conspiracy;  the  housing  and  wages 
of  agricultural  laborers;  the  eSiciency  and  sense  of 
responsibility  found  in  a  posse  of  country  deputies; 
the  temper  of  the  country  people  faced  with  the  con- 
fusion and  rioting  of  a  labor  outbreak ;  all  these  prob- 
lems have  found  a  starting  point  for  their  new  and 
vigorous  analysis  in  the  Wheatland  Riot. 

California  is  yearly  becoming  more  agricultural  and 
less  industrial;  more  seasonal  in  its  demands  for 
labor,  more  dependent  for  the  harvesting  of  the  yearly 
crops  on  the  migratory,  roofless  worker.  This  new 
labor  status  in  the  State  is  menacing  in  its  poten- 
tiality for  spasmodic  waves  of  unrest  and  sudden, 
perplexing  strikes  of  unorganized  workers.  "Passive 
resistance,"  the  new  method  in  labor  warfare,  not  at 
all  the  product  of  the  orthodox  labor  movement,  be- 
comes paralysis  because  the  method,  being  new,  finds 
no  effective  legal  doctrine  or  procedure  to  combat  it. 
The  Wheatland  affair  marks  the  emergence  into 
strong  light  of  a  new  and  vital  problem. 


THE  HOP  FIELDS'  REPORT  173 

This  incident,  known  as  the  "Hop-fields'  Riot,"  con- 
cerned the  hop-pickers  employed  and  camped  upon 

the  D hop  ranch  at  Wheatland,  California,  and  a 

Yuba  County  sheriff's  posse  which  was  largely  re- 
cruited from  the  county  seat,  Marysville,  There  were 
about  2800  men,  women  and  children  camped  on  the 
D ranch  on  a  low  unshaded  hill.  The  camp  com- 
prised a  motley  collection  of  tents,  timber  stockades 
called  "bull-pens,"  gunny  sacks  stretched  over  fences, 
and  camp  wagons.  Toilets  were  scattered  at  irregu- 
lar intervals  among  these  shelters. 

A  general  average  taken  from  22  aflfidavits  on  the 
subject  of  the  total  number  of  people  in  the  camp 
gives  2738.  This,  taken  in  connection  with  oral  state- 
ments made  to  the  investigators  by  Mr.  D and 

D Bros.'  employees,  and  a  careful  inspection  of 

the  books  of  D Bros,  is  the  foundation  for  this 

estimate  of  2800  campers. 

The  general  average  of  the  total  number  of  women 
and  children  in  the  camp,  as  taken  from  19  affi- 
davits, is  1005. 

The  general  average  of  the  total  number  of  aliens 
or  foreigners  in  the  camp,  as  taken  from  18  affi- 
davits, is  1438.  It  may  be  noted  that  during  the 
course  of  the  trial  a  hop  inspector  testified  that  in  his 
gang  of  235  he  counted  27  different  nationalities.  One 
witness  testified  that  he  heard  speakers  using  seven 
different  languages  at  the  meeting  on  Sunday. 

Among  the  important  alien  groups  were  Syrian, 
Mexican,  Spanish  from  the  Hawaiian  sugar  planta- 
tions, Japanese,  Lithuanian,  Italian,  Greek,  Pnli?li, 
Hindu,   Cuban,   Porto   Rican,   and   Swedish.    These 


174  APPENDIX 

aliens  were  unskilled  laborers,  and  many  were  ig- 
norant of  English.  They  lived  in  their  own  native 
quarters  on  the  grounds,  crowded  into  as  few  tents  or 
"bull-pens"  as  was  physically  possible.  They  had,  as 
a  rule,  unclean  personal  and  camp  habits,  exposed 
themselves  at  the  pumps  in  washing,  and  were  inde- 
cently careless  in  the  presence  of  women  and  children. 
The  Americans  were  in  the  main  a  casual-working, 
migratory  labor  class,  with  an  indifferent  standard  of 
life  and  cleanliness.  They  were  recruited  in  part  from 
the  poor  of  the  country  towns,  and  in  part  from  the 
impoverished  ranches  and  mining  camps  of  the  Sierra 
foot-hills.  A  small,  but  essentially  important,  fraction 
were  American  hoboes.  There  were  many  exceptions 
to  these  generalizations.  Many  families  were  of  the 
better  middle  class  and  have  been  in  the  habit  of 
using  the  hop  and  fruit  seasons  to  get  their  "country 
vacations."  They  were  evidently  deeply  humiliated 
by  their  experience,  and  their  indignant  condemna- 
tion of  the  filth  and  sanitary  neglect  has  been,  for  our 
investigation,  the  best  standardization  of  this  phase. 

Method  of  the  Investigation 

This  report  is  founded  on  a  careful  personal  investi- 
gation of  the  physical  facts  by  all  the  investigators 
employed  by  the  commission;  upon  a  close  study  of 
the  trial  of  Ford,  Suhr,  Beck  and  Bagan  at  Marys- 
ville;  upon  interviews  with  witnesses  at  the  trial  and 
with  pickers  who  were  present  on  the  ranch  during 
the  days  before  August  3rd  and  who  were  not  present 
at  the  trial,  but  scattered  throughout  the  State;  and 
upon  interviews  with  residents  of  Yuba  County.    The 


THE  HOP  FIELDS'  REPORT  175 

investigators,  in  taking  testimony,  were  careful  to  call 
upon  the  witnesses  in  their  own  homes,  where  amid 
familiar  surroundings  the  witnesses  could  talk  easily 
and  without  excitement  or  prejudice.  The  testimony 
may  be  classified  as  follows : 

(1)  Written  statements  and  aflBdavits  totaling  67. 

(2)  Of  these  statements,  52  were  made  by  parties 

who  were  not  called  as  witnesses  at  the  trial, 
and  who  were  not  at  any  time  present  in 
Marysville  during  the  course  of  the  trial. 

(3)  Two  of  these  statements  were  made  by  wit- 

nesses called  by  the  prosecution  at  the  trial. 

(4)  Thirteen  of  these  statements  were  made  by 

witnesses  called  by  the  defense  at  the  trial. 
Some  of  these  trial  witnesses'  statements 
were  taken  from  testimony  given  under  oath 
at  the  trial. 

The  large  number  of  defense  witnesses  is  accounted 
for  by  the  fact  that  the  defense  called  many  more 
witnesses  from  the  people  who  were  laborers  on  the 
hop  ranch  before  the  riot;  the  prosecution's  testimony 
dealing  almost  exclusively  with  the  facts  of  the  riot 
itself. 

(5)  Of  these  written  statements,  49  were  made  by 

men  and  18  by  women. 

(6)  In  addition  to  these  written  statements,  there 

were  30  people  interviewed  at  Marysville 
and  Wheatland  during  the  investigation, 
whose  oral  statements  corroborate  the  gen- 
eral conclusion  of  this  report. 

There  is,  therefore,  a  grand  total  of  97  witnesses  to 
the  facts  contained  in  this  report. 


176  APPENDIX 

The  witnesses  who  made  the  written  statements 
have  been  characterized  by  the  investigators  who  ob- 
tained the  statements  as  follows: 

A     (1)  Perfectly  reliable  57 

(2)  Doubtful  reliability 10 

B     (1)  Keenly  observant  of  conditions.  .52 

(2)  Fairly  observant  of  conditions. .  .15 

The  proportions  of  this  characterization  of  those 
making  written  statements  apply  also  to  the  oral  state- 
ments and  interviews. 


Wage  Conditions 

The  first  important  item  in  the  discussion  of  the 
labor  situation  on  the  ranch  is  naturally  that  of  wages. 
In  the  advertisement  for  hop-pickers,  a  copy  of  which 

is  attached  to  this  report,  and  which   D sent 

broadcast  throughout  the  state,  he  stated: 

"The  going  price  paid  for  clean  picking.  A  BONUS 
to  all  pickers  helping  us  and  doing  satisfactory  work, 
to  the  completion  of  the  season  —  a  period  of  three  or 
four  weeks." 

This  indefinite  statement  as  to  the  going  price  seems 
to  have  led  to  no  little  confusion  in  the  minds  of  the 
pickers  who  were  eventually  employed. 

Ninety  cents  per  100  pounds  was  paid  by  D 

during  the  first  week  for  hop  picking  in  1913,  to  which 
a  so-called  "bonus"  of  10  cents  was  added  if  the  picker 
stayed  the  three  or  four  weeks'  season  through.  If 
the  pickers  quit  before  the  last  day  of  the  season,  this 
so-called  "bonus"  reverted  to  D . 


THE  HOP  FIELDS'  REPORT  177 

If  there  be  a  type,  or  "going"  hop-pickers'  wage  for 
1913  in  California,  it  was  roughly  $1.00  per  100 
pounds  of  hops.  There  are  many  affidavits  to  this 
effect,  and  it  would  certainly  seem  that  this  $1.00  per 
100  pounds  should  have  been  the  "going  price"  on 

the  D ranch  and  the  "going  price"  alluded  to  in 

D 's  advertisements,  especially  when  taken  in  con- 
nection with  the  extra  cleanliness  required  in  picking, 
later  discussed  herein. 

If  the  "going"  wages  in  that  part  of  the  State  for 
hop  picking  had  been  paid  by  D ,  and  the  so- 
called  "bonus"  was  clearly  a  reward  above  this  wage 
for  remaining  the  season  through,  this  system  would 

have  been  legitimate  and  blameless,  but  D paid 

90  cents  per  100  pounds  picked  when  the  "going"  wage 
was  $1.00,  so  his  alleged  "bonus"  was  in  reality  a 
hold-back  out  of  the  normal  hop  picking  wage  of  1913. 
He  had  no  more  right  to  the  10  cents  than  he  would 
have  had  to  50  cents  out  of  the  dollar.  There  is  cir- 
cumstantial evidence  that  this  alleged  bonus  was  in- 
tended at  the  opening  of  the  season  to  be,  and  really 
acted  as,  a  whip  to  force  pickers  to  stay  out  the  season 
in  order  to  receive  in  the  end  their  normal  wage  for 
their  weighed  and  recorded  picking.    It  is  suggestive 

that  on  the  Monday  after  the  Sunday's  riot,  D 

hastily  instituted  the  wage  rate  of  $1.00  per  100 
pounds  straight,  without  the  alleged  bonus.  McCrea, 
the  manager  of  the  D ranch,  stated  to  your  in- 
vestigator that  wages,  in  fact,  had  in  past  seasons  been 
varied  from  day  to  day.  If  a  surplus  of  pickers  came 
to  the  grounds  and  camped  during  a  day,  the  wage 
was  lowered  for  the  next  morning,  as  the  competition 


178  APPENDIX 

of  these  usually  destitute  work  seekers  would  insure 
enough  pickers,  even  at  the  reduced  rate.  If  the 
pickers  were  dissatisfied  and  drifted  out,  wages  were 
raised  the  next  morning.  If  the  drift  threatened  to 
seriously  deplete  the  force,  a  "white  check,"  giving  a 
rate  of  $1.05  for  100  pounds  was  hastily  issued  for  the 
next  day.  This  illustrates  the  use  made  of  the  list  of 
variable  bonuses  noted  above.  The  pressing  need  of 
the  casual  laborers  seemed  to  establish  the  wage  for  hop 
pickers  on  this  ranch,  and  it  is  difficult  to  understand 

D 's  reference  in  his  advertisements  to  the  "going" 

or  ruling  price  which  was  to  be  paid  for  picking  his 

hops.    On  the  other  hand,  D found  by  Friday  of 

the  first  week  that  he  had  about  1000  too  many 

pickers.     There    is    evidence    that    D planned, 

through  State-wide  advertising,  to  bring  more  pickers 
to  his  ranch  than  he  could  possibly  keep  in  the  field. 
Some  of  the  pickers  state  in  their  affidavits  that  after 
they  found  only  occasional  opportunities  to  pick  they 
became  disgusted  with  the  work  and  the  increasing 
filth  of  the  camp  and  left. 
Taking  the  "bonus"  for  forfeitures  of  previous  years 

as    a    standard,   the    "bonuses"    accruing   to    D 

through  the  departure  of  these  discontented  workers 
in  1913  must  have  been  $100  to  $150  per  day.  It  will 
never  be  settled  just  how  many  pickers  left  before  the 
shooting  because  of  intolerable  camp  conditions  and 
thus  forfeited  their  "bonus,"  and  how  many  left  be- 
cause of  the  shooting  and  riot.  One  prior  normal 
year  of  hop  picking  showed  more  than  $500  accruing 
to  Durst  through  forfeited  "bonuses"  with  a  pay  roll 
slightly  over  $19,000. 


THE  HOP  FIELDS'  REPORT  179 

D 's  hop-drying  ovens  could  not  care  for  the 

picking  of  more  than  1500  steadily  employed  pickers, 
so  that  one-third  of  the  campers  hung  around  the 
camp  or  the  office  waiting  for  field  tickets.  In  spite  of 
these  facts,  it  is  to  be  noted  that  in  his  advertisements 
for  pickers,  D stated: 

"All  white  pickers  who  make  application  before 
August  1st  will  be  given  work." 

It  is  evident  that  this  broad  promise  is  one  that 
would  be  well-nigh  impossible  to  fulfill,  yet  it  held 
out  a  hope  for  work  to  the  scattered  laborers  through- 
out California,  Nevada,  and  Southern  Oregon,  and 
there  was  no  way  for  them  to  know  whether  or  not 

D would  have  sufficient  pickers  by  the  time  they 

arrived. 

D made  no  effort  to  reduce  the  campers  in 

number  to  correspond  to  the  force  needed.    The  D 

management,  knowing  exactly  what  was  the  sanitary 
condition  of  the  camp,  and  aware  of  the  threatened 
migration  of  part  of  the  picking  force  because  of  it, 
had  in  its  refusal  to  correct  the  abuses,  laid  itself  open 
to  the  suspicion  of  intentional  carelessness,  because 

of  the  gain  accruing  to  D in  the  share  of  the 

"bonuses"  thus  forfeited  on  account  of  the  pickers 
leaving.'- 

1  In  relation  to  the  above  statement  as  to  the  surphis  num- 
ber of  pickers,  the  following  statement  in  the  affidavit  of  a 
hop  inspector  is  noteworthy: 

"Adequate  facilities  for  loading  and  sacking  hops  were  not 
provided.  There  were  not  enough  sacks.  On  one  da>'.  aftor 
having  filled  a  sack  and  box  by  11  A.  M.  I  was  forced  to  wait 
vintil  3  P.  M.  of  the  same  day,  at  which  time  I  turned  my  hops 


180  APPENDIX 

Oral  statements  were  also  made  to  the  investi- 
gators to  the  effect  that  the  pickers  were  not  furnished 
with  enough  sacks  to  keep  them  busy  picking.  This 
situation  not  only  cut  down  the  earning  capacity  of 
the  pickers  but  naturally  led  to  dissatisfaction  and 
discontent.  There  was  on  this  ranch  patently  no 
danger  of  a  dearth  of  labor  in  this  period,  even  though 
a  part  migrated. 

D has  always  demanded  an  unusual  standard 

of  cleanliness  for  his  hops,  and  inspectors  have  very 
often  forced  pickers  to  go  up  to  the  kilns  to  pick  their 
bags  over.  We  are  convinced  that  the  average  first 
picking  on  this  ranch  was,  in  cleanness  of  hops,  up  to 
the  average  of  the  district,  so  that  this  demand  of  the 
inspectors  was  a  material  handicap  to  the  pickers. 
This  strict  inspection  of  hops,  in  connection  with  the 
unusual  thinness  of  the  hops  on  the  vines,  a  result  of 
the  dry  year,  accounts  in  part  for  the  prevailing  low 
average  wage  of  the  week's  picking  prior  to  the  out- 
break. The  following  are  typical  days'  earnings  for 
this  period:  $1.31,  $1.30,  $1.11,  $.90,  $1.80,  $1.32, 
$1.90,  $1.25,  $.70,  $.92,  $1.32,  $1.82,  $1.18,  $1.27,  $1.41, 
$1.15.  These  figures  were  taken  at  random  from 
D 's  books.^ 

over  to  a  third  party  to  have  weighed,  but  they  were  not 
weighed  until  5  P.  M.  During  this  time  the  hops  dried  in  the 
hot  sun  and  lost  weight  and  I  remained  idle.  I  observed  this 
same  thing  in  the  case  of  other  persons." 

1  The  following  extracts  from  affidavits  as  to  the  conditions 
of  picking  and  the  cleanliness  required  in  the  hops  indicate 
the  difficulties  encountered  by  the  pickers,  as  weU  as  their 
state  of  mind: 

"I  worked  for  D Bros,  in  1912,  and  the  requirements 

for  picking  hops  clean  were  not  as  strict  as  in  1913.  They  did 
not  allow  small  stems  or  leaves  in  the  hops.     Many  pickers 


THE  HOP  FIELDS'  REPORT  181 


Sanitary  Condition  of  Camp 

In  answer  to  D 's  misleading  advertisements 

scattered  throughout  California,  Oregon,  and  even 
Nevada,  about  3000  people  arrived  on  the  ranch 
within  four  days.  They  came  by  every  conceivable 
means  of  transportation.     A  great  number  had  no 

had  to  pick  their  hops  over  again  whenever  the  inspectors 
found  that  the  hops  contained  a  few  stems  or  leaves.    The 

previous  year  I  worked  for  D Bros.    I  was  able  tb  average 

S3.00  a  day  for  the  season  but  in  1913  I  just  barely  made  85 
cents  a  day  and  worked  harder  than  the  previous  year." 

Following  is  an  extract  from  the  affidavit  of  an  experienced 
hop  picker: 

"I  have  picked  hops  in  other  places  and  have  made  as 

much  as  $4.00  a  day,  but  on  the  D ranch  I  never  made 

more  than  90  cents  a  day.  D— —  required  the  hops  to  be 
picked  too  clean.  He  never  supplied  high-pole  men  and  the 
pickers  —  women  and  children  —  had  to  get  poles  themselves 
and  get  the  hops  down.  We  would  also  have  to  pack  the  hops 
about  200  yards  to  have  them  weighed  and  were  also  com- 
pelled to  carry  them  several  feet  and  load  them  on  the  wagon. 
The  hop  inspectors  would  make  me  and  other  pickers  pick 
the  hops  over  again,  even  if  they  were  clean.  The  inspectors 
would  dump  the  hops  out  and  have  us  pick  them  into  another 
sack.  They  compelled  us  to  pick  little  stems  and  leaves  out 
of  the  hops  even  if  not  larger  than  a  nickel." 

The  following  last  extract  from  an  affidavit  on  this  point 
carries  great  weight,  as  it  was  made  by  a  hop  inspector  on  the 
ranch: 

"The  inspection  was  made  so  close  that  the  best  pickers 
could  not  make  over  $1.50  a  day  (when  combined  with  short- 
age of  sacks,  etc.).    Because  D had  about  3000  pickers 

(he  had  about  2800  numbers  and  several  worked  under  one 
number)  he  said  he  would  make  an  extra  clean  inspection  and 
would  allow  only  two  hops  on  one  stem,  and  no  leaf  bigger 
than  a  nickel,  while  pickers  are  usually  allowed  to  strip  off 
whole  handfuls,  leaves  and  all.  These  conditions  were  not 
stated  in  his  advertisements  and  no  one  expected  them.  All 
the  pickers  were  used  to  making  from  $2.50  to  $5.00  per  day 
and  then,  under  the  above  conditions,  came  down  to  85  cents 
to  $1.50  a  day.  Right  after  August  Srd  these  standards  were 
lotoered  to  the  usval  ones  and  all  sacks  needed  were  furnished." 


182  APPENDIX 

blankets  and  slept  on  piles  of  straw  thrown  onto  the 

tent  floors.    These  tents  were  rented  from  D at 

75  cents  a  week,  though  some  old  tents  were  donated 
by  him  free  of  charge.  Before  these  and  other  ac- 
commodations were  ready,  many  slept  in  the  fields. 
One  group  of  45  men,  women,  and  children  slept 
packed  closely  together  on  a  single  pile  of  straw.  The 
moral  conditions  of  these  hop-fields  are  notoriously 
lax,  and  this  camp  was  no  exception.  At  least  one- 
half  the  campers  were  absolutely  destitute,  and  those 
who  got  an  opportunity  to  work  were  forced  to  cash 
in  their  checks  each  evening  to  feed  tent  companions. 
There  are  many  recorded  instances  of  actual  suffering 
and  hunger. 

Perhaps  the  most  vicious  sanitary  abuse  was  that 
of  toilets.  There  were  very  probably  nine  of  these 
for  the  2800  people.  There  were  certainly  not  less 
than  8,  nor  more  than  11.  D 's  camp  toilet  ac- 
commodations were  one-tenth  of  the  army  minimum. 

[Note.  There  follow  twenty-four  aflBdavits  testify- 
ing to  the  consequent  unsanitary  condition  of  the 
camp,  and  especially  its  effect  on  the  women  and 
children.] 

Garbage 

Despite  the  easily  forecasted  garbage  problem  that 
must  of  necessity  arise  in  a  camp  of  nearly  3000 
people,  no  real  provision  was  made  to  take  care  of 
the  garbage.  Food  and  refuse  were  thrown  out  be- 
side and  behind  the  tents  and  even  in  the  paths.  A 
group  of  families  killed  a  sheep  about  Thursday  or 


THE  HOP  FIELDS'  REPORT  183 

Friday  of  the  week  of  the  riot,  and  on  Monday  a 
military  surgeon  saw  the  entrails  lying  beside  the 
tent  in  the  sun  as  he  went  there  to  attend  a  sick  child. 
This  absolute  want  of  garbage  disposal  without  a 
doubt  accounts  for  a  dangerous  epidemic  of  dysentery 
which  had  run  through  the  camp  by  Saturday  of  that 
week. 

There  is  ample  evidence  that  the  lack  of  garbage 
collections  was  not  confined  to  only  one  or  two  lo- 
calities in  camp,  but  that  the  refuse  was  scattered 
generally  over  the  camp  ground. 

[Ten  aflSdavits  follow  describing  the  condition  of  the 
camp  due  to  improper  garbage  disposal.] 

Water 

The  wells,  probably  because  the  water  supply  had 
been  diminished  by  two  dry  years,  were  absolutely  in- 
suffic*''''t  for  the  camp.  Two  of  the  wells  were  often 
pum  iry  by  sun-up,  and  the  campers  were  forced 
eith'  J  go  to  town  for  water,  or  to  distant  wells,  or 
to  wells  among  the  ranch  buildings.  There  are  nu- 
merous affidavits  and  statements  to  the  effect  that 
two  of  the  wells  were  out  of  order  or  failed  to  pump 
;water  a  great  deal  of  the  time.  .   .   . 

There  are  numerous  statements  to  the  effect  that 
every  morning  and  evening  there  were  lines  of  from 
10  to  35  people  at  each  well  waiting  to  get  water. 
According  to  the  weight  of  testimony,  there  were 
available  for  the  hop  pickers  on  August  3rd,  1913,  5 
wells  and  2  hydrants. 

It  is  also  evident  that  the  condition  of  the  wells  was 


184  APPENDIX 

not  what  it  should  have  been.  The  platforms  were 
made  of  rough  board  planking  and  the  people  were 
allowed  to  wash,  not  only  their  persons,  but  their 
clothes,  imder  the  faucets,  and  on  these  platforms,  al- 
lowing the  dirty  water  to  drain  back  into  the  wells. 
Moreover,  around  at  least  two  of  the  wells  small  ponds 
of  stagnant  water  were  allowed  to  form,  and  garbage 
and  refuse  collected  in  these  dimip  holes  and  this  water 
drained  back  into  the  wells. 

The  water  itself  seems  to  have  been  the  average 
good  valley  water,  although  numerous  affidavits  state 
that  it  had  an  alkali  taste  and  was  often  roily  and 
muddy.  Moreover,  the  fact  that  dirty  water  was 
allowed  to  drain  back  into  the  wells  signifies  that  after 
a  few  days  the  supply  must  necessarily  have  become 
more  or  less  contaminated  by  the  disintegrating  gar- 
bage and  vegetable  matter. 

An  important  part  of  the  hop  field  was  more  than 
a  mile  away  from  the  wells,  but  despite  the  great  heat 
of  this  week,  ranging  from  106  to  110  in  the  shade,  no 

water  was  transported  to  the  pickers.     D told 

your  investigator  that  although  he  knew,  as  a  rule, 
that  picking  began  on  the  ranch  by  Thursday  or 
Friday,  he  never  planned  to  have  the  water  wagon  go 
out  to  the  fields  until  the  following  Monday.  Upon 
being  asked  a  reason  for  this  failure  to  send  out  a 
water  wagon  during  these  three  days  of  intense  heat, 

Mr.  D explained  that  the  hop  vines  were  growing 

in  the  roadways  in  the  field  and  would  not  allow  the 
wagon  to  enter  the  field.  Confronted  with  his  own 
statement  and  also  the  evidence  in  numerous  affi- 
davits, that  a  stew  wagon  and  a  lemonade  wagon 


THE  HOP  FIELDS'  REPORT  185 

went  about  the  field  during  these  three  days  selling 

their  goods  to  the  thirsty  pickers,  Mr.  D answered 

that  the  water  wagon,  in  addition  to  the  stew  and 
lemonade  wagons,  would  have  "cluttered  up  the  field 
with  wagons." 

The  pickers  during  this  week  would  be  in  the  fields 
by  dawn,  about  4  o'clock,  and  about  200  to  300 
children  were  taken  into  the  fields  with  the  women. 
By  noon,  under  the  burning  sun  beating  down  on  the 
still  air  held  between  the  rows  of  vines,  the  children, 
many  of  whom  were  very  small,  were  in  a  pitiable 
condition  because  of  the  lack  of  water.  Numerous 
instances  of  sickness  and  partial  prostration  among 
children  from  five  to  ten  years  of  age  were  mentioned 
in  testimony.^ 


Lemonade  and  Store  Concessions  and  Ranch  Store 

D had  let  a  lemonade  contract  to  his  cousin, 

J D ,  who  offered  lemonade  in  the  fields  at 

five  cents  a  glass.    This  lemonade  was  proven,  upon 

1  The  few  following  extracts  from  aflfidavits  and  statements 
go  further  to  emphasize  the  hardships  caused  by  the  lack  of 
drinking  water  in  the  fields  than  any  amount  of  description: 

"I  carried  water  to  the  field  in  a  demijohn  and  it  would 
only  last  about  3  hours  and  it  took  an  hour  to  go  to  camp 
for  more  water." 

"We  had  to  carry  our  own  water.  A  demijohn  only  lasted 
about  half  a  day  and  we  had  to  walk  from  a  mile  to  a  mile 
and  a  half  to  refill  it.  There  were  a  great  many  children  in 
the  field  who  cried  for  water  and  it  was  very  pitiful  to  see  them 
suffer  for  want  of  it.  Many  times  I  gave  my  water  awu\'  to 
little  children." 

"My  ovm  boy  had  to  go  back  nearly  two  miles  to  camp 
every  day  at  noon  and  get  drinking  water  and  this  got  hot  as 
hell  and  took  time  from  work." 


186  APPENDIX 

the  testimony  of  the  druggist's  clerk  with  whom  J 

D traded,  to  have  been  made  largely  from  citric 

acid.  .   .   . 

There  was  also  a  concession  to  sell  stew  and  a  stew 
wagon  went  out  about  noon  each  day  among  the 
pickers.  There  is  a  fact  in  connection  with  these 
lemonade  and  stew  concessions  that  is  tinged  with  a 
certain  irony.  The  lemonade  and  stew  concessions 
were  entrusted  with  the  duty  of  furnishing  drinking 
water  to  the  pickers.  It  is  not  strange  that  all  the 
witnesses  testify  that  the  man  who  was  selling  lemon- 
ade refused  to  give  away  drinking  water  unless  the 
thirsty  pickers  bought  lemonade,  or  that  the  stew  man 
gave  water  only  to  those  who  bought  stew.^ 

There  was  absolutely  no  excuse  given  for  the  ab- 
sence of  water  in  the  fields,  and  the  failure  of  the 
ranch  management  to  provide  for  this  suggests,  almost 
more  than  any  other  single  incident,  the  absolute  in- 
ability of  the  D management  to  realize  any  kind 

1  The  following  is  a  sample  collection  of  extracts  from 
the  almost  pitiful  affidavits  on  this  point: 

"Water  was  brought  out  on  the  lunch  wagon  to  the  field, 
but  it  was  free  only  to  those  who  bought  lunches.  No  other 
water  was  given  away." 

"J D sold  ice  cream  cones  and  lemonade  in  the 

fields  and  was  supposed  to  give  the  pickers  water  for  this 
privilege.  He  always  had  a  barrel  of  water  with  him  on 
the  wagon  and  one  day  we  asked  him  for  the  water:  'If  I  give 
water  away,  I  will  not  be  albe  to  sell  lemonade  or  soda.' " 

"There  was  no  drinking  water  furnished  to  pickers,  but  there 
was  a  man  selling  lemonade  and  ice  cream  cones.  This  man 
was  supposed  to  furnish  drinking  water,  but  refused  to  give 
any  away  free.  He  told  two  boys  he  would  let  them  have 
water  at  five  cents  per  quart.  I  purchased  a  pint  of  lemonade 
Saturday  afternoon  and  I  and  my  children  were  almost  per- 
ishing for  a  drink  of  water.  The  lemonade  contained  a  great 
deal  of  citric  acid  and  almost  cut  the  insides  out  of  us." 


THE  HOP  FIELDS'  REPORT  187 

of  social  responsibility  for  the  condition  of  the  human 
beings  employed  on  the  ranch. 

Store 

It  is  a  pertinent  fact  that  D ,  while  admitting 

that  delivery  wagons  from  Wheatland  grocery  stores, 
butcher  shops,  and  bakeries,  were  strictly  forbidden 
to  come  on  the  camp  grounds,  also  admitted  that  he 
had  a  50  per  cent  share  of  the  profits  of  a  general  food 
store  built  by  him  on  the  grounds. 

Sickness 

In  due  time,  and  as  a  natural  result  of  these  un- 
sanitary conditions,  sickness  developed.  There  is  a 
considerable  evidence  that  dysentery  and  diarrhoea 
were  prevalent  in  the  camp,  and  there  are  also  re- 
corded instances  not  only  of  malarial  fever,  but  of 
typhoid.  These  facts  are  not  surprising  considering 
the  fact  that  the  toilets  were  in  such  a  dilapidated 
condition;  that  flies  were  allowed  to  breed  there,  as 
well  as  in  the  horse  manure  at  the  barn,  by  the  thou- 
sand, and  then  the  uncared  for  garbage  provided  an 
abundant  food  for  these  flies  so  that  they  became 
ever-increasing  and  active  carriers  of  the  intestinal 
infection  in  the  toilets.^ 

Two  women,  mothers  of  large  families,  have  written 

1  Following  are  extracts  from  affidavits  in  regard  to  sick- 
ness in  the  camp: 
"I  had  malarial  fever.    So  did  some  other  women  I  know." 
"I  know  of  one  family  that  all  had  typhoid." 
"I  had  malarial  fever,  which  lasted  until   I  came  to  San 


188  APPENDIX 

in  and  reported  the  existence  in  their  families  of 
typhoid,  which  originated  beyond  reasonable  doubt 

at  the  D ranch.    In  one  case,  it  is  alleged  that 

four  out  of  a  party  of  five  had  typhoid.  It  is  a  matter 
of  common  knowledge  that  there  are  at  present  in 
every  labor  camp  in  California  active  typhoid  carriers 
and  the  careless  conditions  at  this  camp  afforded  an 
excellent  opportunity  for  spreading  the  disease. 

The  Employer 

R D ,  the  manager  and  part-owner  of  the 

ranch,  is  an  example  of  a  certain  type  of  California 
employer.  The  refusal  of  this  type  to  meet  the  social 
responsibilities  which  come  with  the  hiring  of  human 
beings  for  labor,  not  only  works  concrete  and  cruelly 
unnecessary  misery  upon  a  class  little  able  to  combat 
personal  indignity  and  degradation,  but  adds  fuel  to 
the  fire  of  resentment  and  unrest  which  is  beginning 
to  burn  in  the  uncared  for  migratory  worker  in  Cali- 
fornia.   That  D could  refuse  his  clear  duty  of 

trusteeship  of  a  camp  on  his  own  ranch  which  con- 
tained hundreds  of  women  and  children  is  a  social 
fact  of  miserable  import.  The  excuses  we  have  heard 
of  unpreparedness,  of  alleged  ignorance  of  conditions, 
are  shamed  by  the  proven  human  suffering  and  hu- 
miliation repeated  each  day  from  Wednesday  to  Sim- 
day  of  that  week.    Even  where  the  employer's  innate 

Francisco,  and  my  friends  also  had  it.  Many  became  ill  with 
malarial  fever." 

"Two  of  my  children  got  malarial  fever  and  had  to  leave 
on  Saturday,  August  2nd." 

"Every  year  I  worked  for  D there  were  cases  of  ma- 
laria and  typhoid  in  the  camp." 


THE  HOP  FIELDS'  REPORT  189 

sense  of  moral  obligation  fails  to  point  out  his  duty, 
he  should  have  realized  the  insanity  of  stimulating 
unrest  and  bitterness  in  this  inflammable  labor  force. 
The  riot  on  the  D ranch  is  a  California  contri- 
bution to  the  literature  of  the  social  unrest  of  America. 


The  I.  W.  W. 

Of  this  entire  labor  force  at  the  D ranch,  it 

appears  that  some  100  had  been  I,  W.  W.  "card  men" 
or  had  had  aflBliations  with  that  organization.  There 
is  evidence  that  there  was  in  this  camp  a  loosely 
caught  together  camp  local  of  the  I.  W.  W.,  with 
about  30  active  members.  It  is  suggestive  that  these 
30  men,  through  a  spasmodic  action,  and  with  the  aid 
of  the  deplorable  camp  conditions,  dominated  a  hetero- 
geneous mass  of  2800  unskilled  laborers  in  3  days. 
Some  700  or  800  of  the  force  were  of  the  "hobo"  class, 
in  every  sense  potential  I.  W.  W.  strikers.  At  least 
400  knew  in  a  rough  way  the  —  for  them  curiously 
attractive  —  philosophy  of  the  I.  W.  W.  and  could 
also  sing  some  of  its  songs. 

Of  the  100  odd  "card  men"  of  the  I.  W.  W.,  some 
had  been  through  the  San  Diego  affair,  some  had  been 
soap-boxers  in  Fresno,  a  dozen  had  been  in  the  Free 
Speech  fight  in  Spokane.  They  sized  up  the  hop  field 
as  a  ripe  opportunity,  as  the  principal  defendant, 
"Blackie"  Ford,  puts  it,  "to  start  something."  On 
Friday,  two  days  after  picking  started,  the  practical 
agitators  began  working  through  the  camp.    Whether 

or  not  Ford  came  to  D 's  ranch  to  foment  trouble 

seems  immaterial.    There  are  five  Fords  in  every  camp 


190  APPENDIX 

of  seasonal  laborers  in  California.  We  have  devoted 
ourselves  in  these  weeks  to  such  questions  as  this: 
"How  big  a  per  cent  of  California's  migratory  seasonal 
labor  force  know  the  technique  of  an  I.  W.  W.  strike?" 
"How  many  of  the  migratory  laborers  know  when 
conditions  are  ripe  to  'start  something'?"  We  are 
convinced  that  among  the  individuals  of  every  fruit 
farm  labor  group  are  many  potential  strikers.  Where 
a  group  of  hoboes  sit  around  a  fire  under  a  railroad 
bridge,  many  of  the  group  can  sing  I.  W.  W.  songs 
without  the  book.  This  was  not  so  three  years  ago. 
The  I.  W.  W.  in  California  is  not  a  closely  organized 
body  with  a  steady  membership.  The  rank  and  file 
know  little  of  the  technical  organization  of  industrial 
life  which  their  written  constitution  demands.  They 
listen  eagerly  to  the  appeal  for  the  "solidarity"  of 
their  class.  In  the  dignifying  of  vagabondage  through 
their  crude,  but  virile,  song  and  verse,  in  the  bitter 
vilification  of  the  jail  turnkey  and  county  sheriff, 
in  their  condemnation  of  the  church  and  its  formal 
social  work,  they  find  the  vindication  of  their  hobo 
status  which  they  desire.  They  cannot  sustain  a  live 
organization  unless  they  have  a  strike  or  free  speech 
fight  to  stimulate  their  spirit.  It  is  in  their  methods 
of  warfare,  not  in  their  abstract  philosophy  or  even 
hatred  of  law  and  judges,  that  danger  lies  for  organ- 
ized society.  Since  every  one  of  the  5000  laborers  in 
California  who  have  been  at  some  time  connected  with 
the  I.  W.  W.  considers  himself  a  "camp  delegate"  with 
walking  papers  to  organize  a  camp  local,  this  small 
army  is  watching,  as  Ford  did,  for  an  unsanitary 
camp  or  low  wage  scale,  to  start  the  strike  which  will 


THE  HOP  FIELDS'  REPORT  191 

not  only  create  a  new  I.  W.  W.  local,  but  bring  fame 
to  the  organizer.  This  common  acceptance  of  direct 
action  and  sabotage  as  the  rule  of  operation,  the  songs 
and  the  common  vocabulary  are,  we  feel  convinced, 
the  first  stirring  of  a  class  expression. 

Class  solidarity  they  have  not.  That  may  never 
come,  for  the  migratory  laborer  has  neither  the  force 
nor  the  vision  nor  tenacity  to  hold  long  enough  to  the 
ideal  to  attain  it.  But  the  I.  W.  W.  is  teaching  a 
method  of  action  which  will  give  this  class  expression 
in  violent  flare-ups  such  as  that  at  Wheatland, 

The  dying  away  of  the  organization  after  the  out- 
burst is,  therefore,  to  be  expected.  Their  social  con- 
dition is  a  miserable  one.  Their  work,  even  at  the 
best,  must  be  irregular.  They  have  nothing  to  lose  in 
a  strike  and  as  a  leader  put  it:  "A  riot  and  a  chance 
to  blackguard  a  jailer  is  about  the  only  intellectual 
fun  we  have." 

Taking  into  consideration  the  misery  and  physical 
privation  and  the  barren  outlook  of  this  life  of  the 
seasonal  worker,  the  I.  W.  W.  movement,  with  all  its 
irresponsible  motive  and  unlawful  action,  becomes  in 
reality  a  class  protest  and  the  dignity  which  this 
characteristic  gives  it  perhaps  alone  explains  the  per- 
sistence of  the  organization  in  the  field. 

Those  attending  the  protest  mass  meeting  of  the 
Wheatland  hop  pickers  were  singing  the  I.  W.  W.  song 
"Mr.  Block"  when  the  sheriff's  posse  came  up  in  its 
automobiles.  The  crowd  had  been  harangued  by  an 
experienced  I.  W.  W.  orator  —  "Blackic"  Ford.  They 
had  been  told,  according  to  evidence,  to  "knock  the 
blocks  off  the  scissor  bills."    Ford  had  taken  a  sirk 


192  APPENDIX 

baby  from  its  mother's  arms  and,  holding  it  before  the 
eyes  of  the  1500  people,  had  cried  out:  "It's  for  the 
life  of  the  kids  we're  doing  this."  Not  a  quarter  of 
the  crowd  was  of  a  type  normally  venturesome  enough 
to  strike,  and  yet,  when  the  sheriff  went  after  Ford,  he 
was  knocked  down  and  kicked  senseless  by  infuriated 
men.  In  the  bloody  riot  which  then  ensued.  District 
Attorney  Manwell,  Deputy  Sheriff  Riordan,  a  negro 
Porto  Rican  and  the  English  boy  were  shot  and  killed. 
Many  were  wounded.  The  posse  literally  fled  and  the 
camp  remained  practically  unpoliced  until  the  state 
militia  arrived  at  dawn  the  next  day. 

The  question  of  social  responsibility  is  one  of 
deepest  significance.  The  posse  was,  I  am  convinced, 
over-nervous  and,  unfortunately,  over-rigorous.  This 
can  be  explained  in  part  by  the  State-wide  appre- 
hension over  the  I.  W.  W.;  in  part  by  the  normal 
California  county  posse's  attitude  toward  a  labor 
trouble.  A  deputy  sheriff,  at  the  most  critical  moment, 
fired  a  shot  in  the  air,  as  he  stated:  "To  sober  the 
crowd."  There  were  armed  men  in  the  crowd,  for 
every  crowd  of  2000  casual  laborers  includes  a  score 
of  gunmen.  Evidence  goes  to  show  that  even  the 
gentler  mountainfolk  in  the  crowd  had  been  aroused 
to  a  sense  of  personal  injury. 

D 's  automobile  had  brought  part  of  the  posse. 

Numberless  pickers  cling  to  the  belief  that  the  posse 

was  "D 's  police."    When  Deputy  Sheriff  Dakin 

shot  into  the  air,  a  fusillade  took  place  and  when  he 
had  fired  his  last  shell  an  infuriated  crowd  of  men 
and  women  chased  him  to  the  ranch  store,  where  he 
was  forced  to  barricade  himself.    The  crowd  was  dan- 


THE  HOP  FIELDS'  REPORT  193 

gerous  and  struck  the  first  blow.  The  murderous 
temper  which  turned  the  crowd  into  a  mob  is  incom- 
patible with  social  existence,  let  alone  social  progress. 
The  crowd  at  the  moment  of  the  shooting  was  a  wild 
and  lawless  animal.  But  to  your  investigator  the  im- 
portant subject  to  analyze  is  not  the  guilt  or  inno- 
cence of  Ford  or  Suhr,  as  the  direct  stimulators  of  the 
mob  in  action,  but  to  name  and  standardize  the  early 
and  equally  important  contributors  to  a  psychological 
situation  which  resulted  in  an  unlawful  killing.  If 
this  is  done,  how  can  we  omit  either  the  filth  of  the 
hop  ranch,  the  cheap  gun  talk  of  the  ordinary  deputy 
sheriff,  or  the  unbridled,  irresponsible  speech  of  the 
soap  box  orator? 

Without  doubt  the  propaganda  which  the  I.  W.  W. 
had  actually  adopted  for  the  California  seasonal 
worker  can  be,  in  its  fairly  normal  working  out  in 
law,  a  criminal  conspiracy,  and  under  that  charge. 
Ford  and  Suhr  have  been  found  guilty  of  the  Wheat- 
land murder.  But  the  important  fact  is  that  this 
propaganda  will  be  carried  out,  whether  unlawful  or 
not.  We  have  talked  hours  with  the  I.  W.  W.  leaders 
and  they  are  absolutely  conscious  of  their  position  in 
the  eyes  of  the  law.  Their  only  comment  is  that  they 
are  glad  if  it  must  be  a  conspiracy,  that  it  is  a 
criminal  conspiracy.  They  have  volunteered  the  be- 
ginning of  a  cure;  it  is  to  clean  up  the  housing  and 
wage  problem  of  the  seasonal  worker.  The  shrewdest 
I.  W.  W.  leader  we  found  said:  "We  can't  agitate  in 
the  country  unless  things  are  rotten  enough  to  bring 
the  crowd  along."  They  evidently  were  in  Wheat- 
land. 


194  APPENDIX 

Legal  and  Economic  Aspects 

The  position  taken  by  the  defense  and  their  sym- 
pathizers in  the  course  of  the  trial  has  not  only  an 
economic  and  social  bearing,  but  many  arguments 
made  before  the  court  are  distinct  efforts  to  introduce 
sociological  modifications  of  the  law  which  will  have 
a  far-reaching  effect  on  the  industrial  relations  of 
capital  and  labor.  It  is  asserted  that  the  common 
law,  on  which  American  jurisprudence  is  founded,  is 
known  as  an  ever-developing  law,  which  must  adapt 
itself  to  changing  economic  and  social  conditions  and, 
in  this  connection,  it  is  claimed  that  the  established 
theories  of  legal  causation  must  be  enlarged  to  in- 
clude economic  and  social  factors  in  the  chain  of 
causes  leading  to  a  result.    Concretely,  it  is  argued : 

First,  That  when  unsanitary  conditions  lead  to  dis- 
content so  intense  that  the  crowd  can  be  incited  to 
bloodshed,  those  responsible  for  the  unsanitary  con- 
ditions are  to  be  held  legally  responsible  for  the  blood- 
shed as  well  as  the  actual  inciters  of  the  riot. 

Second,  That  if  the  law  will  not  reach  out  so  far  as 
to  hold  the  creator  of  unsanitary,  unlivable  conditions 
guilty  of  bloodshed,  at  any  rate  such  conditions  ex- 
cuse the  inciters  from  liability,  because  inciters  are 
the  involuntary  transmitting  agents  of  an  uncontrol- 
lable force  set  in  motion  by  those  who  created  the  un- 
livable conditions. 

This  involves  the  problem  of  how  far  an  inciter  or 
agitator  may  go  without  overstepping  his  "Right  of 
Free  Speech."  It  is  contended  by  the  defense  in  the 
trial  at  Marysville  that  when  men  are  made  to  work 


THE  HOP  FIELDS'  REPORT  195 

under  conditions  which  normally  lead  to  discontent 
and  revolt,  that  the  words  of  the  agitator  are  not  real 
factors  in  producing  criminal  and  bloody  results,  and 
that  the  agitator  is  to  be  allowed  more  latitude  and 
can  go  further  without  being  legally  held  responsible 
than  can  the  agitator  who  maliciously  urges  a  crowd 
to  violence  under  normal  and  ordinary  conditions. 
And  this  is  one  of  the  grounds  on  which  it  is  urged 
that  the  famous  "Anarchist's  Case"  of  Spies  v.  The 
People  of  Illinois,  is  to  be  distinguished  from  the 
Wheatland  case;  that  here  in  Wheatland,  the  condi- 
tions are  more  vital,  overwhelming  forces  in  leading 
to  the  riot  than  were  the  economic  forces  in  the  Spies 
case,  and,  therefore,  phrases  and  actions  which  there 
were  held  to  go  beyond  the  "Right  of  Free  Speech" 
would  here  be  within  the  right,  as  immaterial  and 
non- contributing  causes. 

Furthermore,  on  the  legal  side,  modifications  of  the 
law  of  property  are  urged.  It  is  argued  that  modern 
law  no  longer  holds  the  rights  of  private  property 
sacred,  that  these  rights  are  being  constantly  regu- 
lated and  limited,  and  that  in  the  Wheatland  case 
the  owner's  traditional  rights  in  relation  to  his  own 
lands  are  to  be  held  subject  to  the  right  of  the  laborers 
to  organize  thereon.  It  is  urged  that  a  worker  on 
land  has  a  "property  right  in  his  job"  and  that  he 
cannot  be  made  to  leave  the  job,  or  the  land,  merely 
because  he  is  trying  to  organize  his  fellow-workers  to 
make  a  protest  as  to  living  and  economic  conditions. 
It  is  urged  that  the  organizing  worker  cannot  be  made 
to  leave  the  job,  because  the  job  is  his  property  and  it 
is  all  that  he  has. 


196  APPENDIX 

So  another  curious  result  of  this  isolated  riot  is  that 
the  courts  are  to  be  brought  directly  into  such  con- 
troversies, not  only  to  decide  technical  legal  questions, 
but  to  consider  the  cause  and  effect  of  economic  forces. 


Problem 

The  problem  is  the  great  problem  of  the  growing, 
dangerous  friction  between  the  men  who  hire  and 
those  who  work,  and  for  the  study  of  which  the  great 
Federal  Commission  on  Industrial  Relations  has  been 
established. 

The  concrete  problem  in  California  is:  What  must 
be  done  to  in  fact  remedy  the  evils  of  the  existing 
industrial  relations  between  casual,  seasonal  workers, 
and  their  employers,  so  as  to  forestall  or  prevent  the 
insidious,  violent  work  of  the  agitator  who,  not  in- 
terested in  improving  living  conditions  and  wage  con- 
ditions, looks  upon  these  only  as  affording  oppor- 
tunities for  stirring  up  discontent  to  fan  the  flames 
of  the  "revolution"  of  his  dreams?  The  seasonal 
workers  are  migratory,  careless  and  disorganized,  so 
that  there  is  no  effective  unit  with  which  the  employers 
can  deal  or  through  which  the  workers  can  present 
their  demands.  Besides,  there  is  ill-will  and  suspicion 
and  fault  on  both  sides.  It  is  also  confidently  to  be 
expected  that  both  sides  will  refuse  honestly  to  take 
stock  of  their  own  deeds  and  intentions,  and  condemn 
the  wrong  they  cannot  help  but  disclose.  Therefore, 
the  remedy,  of  necessity,  means  the  intrusion  of  a  third 
party. 


THE  HOP  FIELDS'  REPORT  197 

The  Remedy 

It  is  obvious  that  the  violent  strike  methods  adopted 
by  the  I.  W.  W.  type  agitators,  which  only  incident- 
ally, although  effectively,  tend  to  improve  camp  con- 
ditions, are  not  to  be  accepted  as  a  solution  of  the 
problem.  It  is  also  obvious  that  the  conviction  of 
the  agitators,  such  as  Ford  and  Suhr,  for  murder  is 
not  a  soluton,  but  is  only  the  punishment  or  revenge 
inflicted  by  organized  society  for  a  past  deed.  The 
Remedy  lies  in  prevention. 

The  laws  of  the  state  already  provide  for  the  regu- 
lation of  the  sanitation  of  labor  camps,  and  the  Com- 
mission of  Immigration  and  Housing  has  made  definite 
preparations  for  the  enforcement  of  these  laws.  The 
inspectors  of  this  Commission  are  already  at  work  in 
the  field,  and  when  the  camps  are  opened  up  at  the 
beginning  of  the  summer  season  the  Conmiission,  act- 
ing in  conjunction  with  the  State  Board  of  Health, 
will  condemn  all  dangerously  unsanitary  camps,  and 
will,  if  necessary,  prosecute  the  employers  to  the  full 
extent  of  the  law,  which  imposes  both  a  heavy  fine 
and  imprisonment. 

It  is  the  opinion  of  your  investigator  that  the  im- 
provement of  living  conditions  in  the  labor  camps  will 
have  the  inomediate  effect  of  making  the  recurrence  of 
impassioned,  violent  strikes  and  riots  not  only  im- 
probable, but  impossible,  and  furthermore,  such  im- 
provement will  go  far  towards  eradicating  the  hatred 
and  bitterness  in  the  minds  of  the  employers  and  in 
the  minds  of  the  roving,  migratory  laborers.  This 
accomplished,  the  two  conflicting  parties  will  be  in  a 


198  APPENDIX 

position  to  meet  on  a  saner,  more  constructive  basis, 
in  solving  the  further  industrial  problems  arising  be- 
tween them. 

As  a  preliminary  to  the  active  enforcement  of  the 
labor  camp  regulation  laws,  the  Commission  of  Im- 
migration and  Housing  is  preparing  to  start  a  state- 
wide campaign  of  warning  and  education  among  the 
large  employers  of  migratory  laborers  and  among  the 
workers  themselves.  The  employers  must  be  shown 
that  it  is  essential  that  living  conditions  among  their 
employees  be  improved,  not  only  in  fulfillment  of  their 
obligations  to  society  in  general,  but  also  in  order  to 
protect  and  promote  their  own  welfare  and  interests. 
They  must  come  to  realize  that  their  own  laxity  in 
allowing  the  existence  of  unsanitary  and  filthy  con- 
ditions gives  a  much-desired  foothold  to  the  very 
agitators  of  the  revolutionary  I.  W.  W.  doctrines 
whom  they  so  dread.  They  must  learn  that  unbearable 
aggravating  living  conditions  inoculate  the  minds  of 
the  otherwise  peaceful  workers  with  the  germs  of 
bitterness  and  violence,  as  was  so  well  exemplified  at 
the  Wheatland  riot,  giving  the  agitators  a  fruitful  field 
wherein  to  sow  the  seeds  of  revolt  and  preach  the 
doctrine  of  direct  action  and  sabotage. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  migratory  laborers  must  be 
shown  that  revolts  accompanied  by  force  in  scattered 
and  isolated  localities  not  only  involve  serious 
breaches  of  law  and  lead  to  crime,  but  that  they  ac- 
complish no  lasting  constructive  results  in  advancing 
their  cause. 

The  Commission  intends  to  furnish  a  clearing  bouse 


THE  HOP  FIELDS'  REPORT  199 

to  hear  complaints  of  grievances,  of  both  sides,  and 
aot  as  a  mediator  or  safety  valve. 

Respectfully  submitted, 

Carleton  H.  Parker. 

Executive  Secretary  for  the 
State  Immigration  and 
Housing  Commission  of  Cal- 
ifornia. 


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